

















































































































i sas «. 

Copyright W__ 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 









MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


MORE 

TWICE-BORN MEN 


NARRATIVES OF A REGENT MOVEMENT IN 
THE SPIRIT OF PERSONAL RELIGION 


BY 

HAROLD BEGBIE 

► * 

Author of “ Twice-Born Men” 

(“Twice-Born Men” was published in England under the title of 
“Broken Earthenware”) 


Nor will that day dawn at a human nod 
When, bursting through the network superpos'd 
By selfish occupation—plot and plan 
Lust, avarice, envy—liberated man, 

All difference with his fellow man compos'd, 

Shall be left standing face to face with God. 

—Matthew Arnold. 



G.P. Putnam’s Sons 

I^wYork @ London 

^nicketBocker flresa 

1923 



Copyright, 1923 
by 

Harold Begbie 

Published in England under the title “Life Changers? 





Made in the United States of America 



OCT -5 1923 

©C1A7592T0 


PREFACE 


A LMOST in secret, a strange work has been going on 
* for the last two or three years among the under¬ 
graduates of many universities, not only here in Eng¬ 
land but all over the world. This work, of which the 
general public knows nothing at all, and of which the re¬ 
ligious authorities so far as I can gather have never heard, 
is the activity of a single person. 

Something more than a year ago I made the acquaint¬ 
ance of this man, and learned from him that he considers 
privacy essential to his method, at any rate that he re¬ 
gards publicity as a grave danger. His genius, I think, 
lies in thinking with an intense preoccupation of indi¬ 
vidual persons. To him the man is much more than the 
multitude, the part infinitely greater than the whole, 
which is probably true in the spiritual sphere. Any idea 
of “mass production” in his work is to him dreadfully 
repellent. Therefore it is that he shuns publication of 
any kind, nurses the shadows of privacy, and never for 
one moment dreams of calculating his gains in statistics. 

For a particular reason I was greatly interested in 
the work of this unusual teacher. I found that he was 
able to do, quite quietly, rationally, and unconventionally, 
a work among the educated and the refined which hitherto 
I had chiefly associated with a more exciting propaganda 
directed to the broken earthenware of our discordant 
civilisations. I discovered that he could change the very 


VI 


PREFACE 


life of students and scholars in the course of conversa¬ 
tion, change that life as profoundly and persuasively as 
ever I have known it changed by emotional missionaries 
among the ignorant and base. Further, I discovered that 
his method was distinguished by a single characteristic, 
which struck me at once as going to the very heart and 
soul of all religious difficulties. 

We became friends; we corresponded with each other; 
at intervals we met and discussed the progress of his 
work. Then, in the summer of last year (1922), I ac¬ 
cepted an invitation to meet a number of university men 
from both sides of the Atlantic who w 7 ere to gather to¬ 
gether in a house-party for the purpose of discussing 
spiritual experience and the best means of privately 
extending this remarkable work of personal religion. 

Those memorable days began, so far as I w-as con¬ 
cerned, w r ith disappointment, even w r ith disapproval. I 
did not like the manner in which the early discussions were 
conducted; many of the phrases used in describing a 
really unique religious experience seemed to me second¬ 
hand and unconvincing; I could not help feeling that I 
w r as not merely wasting my time, but that I w r as fool¬ 
ishly permitting my nerves to be unprofitably irritated. 

Some of the younger men consulted me in private as 
to my opinion of their teacher and his method of con¬ 
ducting these house-parties. I told them of my disap¬ 
pointment and disapproval. The first consequence of 
this confession on my part v r as a tendency to a cave; 
I found myself a rallying-point for discontent and 
mutiny. But this danger w r as averted by the extreme 
frankness and modesty of the remarkable man who had 
brought us together. He changed the manner of the 
public discussions, and left me more leisure to cultivate 


PREFACE 


• • 
Vll 

in private conversation a real acquaintance with my 
fellow-guests. From that moment every hour of my visit 
became interesting to a degree which truly one cannot 
well exaggerate. 

The character of these men, some of them so brilliant 
in scholarship, others so splendid in athletics, and all of 
them, without one exception, so modest and so gloriously 
honest, was responsible for my reawakened interest. They 
were men of the first class, men whom one may fairlv 
call not only the fine flower of our English-speaking 
civilisation, but representative of the best hope we possess 
of weathering the storms of materialism which so pal¬ 
pably threaten to overwhelm the ship which carries the 
spiritual fortunes of humanity. It was impossible in their 
company to doubt any longer that the man who had 
changed their lives, and had made them also changers of 
other men’s lives, was a person of very considerable im¬ 
portance. One regarded him with a new interest, a fresh 
reverence. 

Yet—and this was perhaps the thought which most in¬ 
fluenced me in those first moments of hesitation—some 
of these men spoke to me with troubled criticism of their 
teacher, disliking some of his pet phrases, disapproving 
as vigorously as I did of his theological opinions, but ail 
sticking to him with an unconquerable loyalty as the man 
who had worked a great miracle in their lives, and who 
was by far the most remarkable man of their experience 
in spite of everything that troubled either their taste or 
their judgment. 

Among these men was a young officer who had not yet 
undergone a spiritual change, and who carried about 
with him, behind a charming social appearance, a soul 
that was haunted to the point of torture by a very hor- 


Vlll 


PREFACE 


rible sin. I walked often with this man in the beautiful 
gardens surrounding the house, and he told me a number 
of extremely moving stories of his experiences, first as a 
pilot in the war, and afterwards as a trainer of pilots. 
He could not bear to think of the dead boys whom he 
had passed as fit to fly—many of them killed in their first 
or second flight. But every now and then he would turn 
from the war to speak of F. B., the teacher, expressing 
an anxious doubt as to whether even this miracle-worker 
could ever save him from an intolerable depression of the 
soul. 

This doubt was uttered in no dismal or tragical man¬ 
ner, but with a smile very boyish and agreeable, and in a 
tone which rather suggested that he looked forward to his 
first private talk with F. B. as little more than a curious 
experience. He smoked many cigarettes in a rather 
feverish fashion as he spoke to me of “something on his 
mind,” and I noticed that though the smile seldom left 
his face his hands trembled, while his eyes were seldom 
clear of the damp of secret tears. 

On the last night of the house-party F. B. called this 
young soldier into his room just before ten o’clock. When 
the rest of us went up to bed towards midnight he was 
still there. Next morning as I was entering the dining¬ 
room I felt my arm touched from behind, and, turning 
about, found this man closing up to my side, his pale 
face and suffering eyes lighted by a strange smile of 
boyish gladness and triumphant serenity, in spite of all 
the marks of a sleepless night and great spiritual strain 
which showed behind the brightness of his face like so 
many bruises. 

He asked me to go with him into the garden for a 
moment, and there he told me that he had been with F. B. 


PREFACE 


IX 


till past two in the morning, that he had confessed every¬ 
thing, that (laughing quietly) a most extraordinary 
change had taken place inside him, that he was no longer 
oppressed, that he was indeed amazingly happy, and, best 
thing of all, he now had a definite work before him. F. B. 
said, he told me on a deeper note, that he must cross the 
sea to a far country, that he must there seek out a youth 
whom he had once put on the wrong road of life, that he 
must adopt that youth, bring him back to England, watch 
over him, and never leave him till his soul was right. 

The profound happiness of this man, and his deep 
joy in the hard and difficult task which he had most 
gladly undertaken, made so great an impression upon 
me that I presently sought out F. B. and told him of my 
wish to write this book. I said that a book which faith¬ 
fully described such wonderful work might do something 
to create in the minds of many people a new and intel¬ 
ligent interest in religion; that religion was losing ground 
and materialism was gaining ground chiefly because the 
power of religion to change the lives of men was now 
almost wholly unknown, or, if known, was regarded as an 
example of mere emotionalism working on weak intellects. 

He agreed with this contention, stipulating only that 
no mention of his name should be made in the book; he left 
me free to conclude my own arrangements with those of 
my fellow-guests who seemed most likely to further the 
purpose in my mind. 

In this manner the pages which follow came to be 
written. 


















CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface ........ v 

I.—According to Thy Faith .... 3 

II.—The Soul Surgeon ..... 20 

III.—Greats ........ 38 

IV.— A Rugger Blue ...... 71 

V.—Persona Grata ...... 85 

VI.—Beau Ideal ....... 102 

VII.—Princeton . . . . . . .117 

VIII.— A Young Soldier ...... 127 

IX.—The Virginian . . . . . .137 

Conclusion—Immortality . . . .149 


xi 







































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MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


CHAPTER I 

ACCORDING TO THY FAITH 

A T the outset I will make it quite plain how the method 
of F. B. chiefly differs, in my opinion, from the 
methods of most other men engaged in work of this 
nature. 

But I must be frank with the reader, and tell him at 
once that F. B. would probably correct me at almost 
every point of my explanation, thrusting in with theo¬ 
logical formulas which he himself considers essential to 
the success of his work. 

I make bold to think, however, on the same ground 
which entitles the least of us to say that the onlooker 
sees most of the game, that I discern better than F. B. 
himself what makes his work so extraordinarily fruitful, 
This w r ould be an insufferably vain assumption if I had 
not confirmed my opinion on several occasions in dis¬ 
course with those whose lives have been so marvellously 

%/ 

changed under the influence of F. B. They are my wit¬ 
nesses. In the third chapter of this book the reader will 
see how amply I am justified in proffering this particular 
excuse for what otherwise would certainly be an imperti¬ 
nent presumption. 


3 


4 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


When a man who has heard of F. B., or has met him 
in a fellow-undergraduate’s room, goes to see F. B. in 
private, he usually begins by a statement of his theo¬ 
logical difficulties. 

F. B. hears him out. He never interrupts. He -waits 
patiently and quite unemotionally, his eyes absorbed in 
studying the eyes of his visitor, until the young man’s 
mind has emptied itself of all its intellectual objections 
to Christianity—those grave intellectual objections which 
distract so many minds, and which so few Christian 
apologists ever face with the uncompromising honesty 
taken for granted among men of science. 

Then F. B. makes this remark! ‘‘It isn’t any intel¬ 
lectual difficulty which is keeping you from God. It is 
sin. You are a—” It may be anything, from the very 
worst and most deadly order of sinners to the victim of 
a bad habit reckoned by some people to be comparatively 
harmless. 

In nine cases out of ten the diagnosis is true, for he is 
now so great a master in what he calls soul-surgery that 
he know r s the facial indication of almost every sin which 
men think they can keep to themselves. But the correct¬ 
ness of the diagnosis is not the point. The point is that 
he brushes aside all the mental excuses of a distressed 
spirit and confronts it with the cold and deadly truth 
that it is sin, a sin which it refuses to give up, does not 
want to give up, and will not give up without a tre¬ 
mendous struggle, which is locking the door on its natural 
peace, its natural happiness, and its natural power. 

The theory on which he works may be expressed in 
simple language after this manner: 

Sin is a word which denotes a choosing. The will 


ACCORDING TO THY FAITH 


5 


chooses the bad. It is its duty, in the interest of the 
world, to choose the good. It is fatal to its own peace 
and happiness to choose the bad. But it chooses the bad. 
This act of choosing constitutes the sin» 

So long as it consents to the slavery of the bad it 
cannot perceive that to choose good is not only right, 
but a matter of the first importance to its own liberty. 
All sin is reaction; it is an attempt on the part of the 
human will to reverse the processes of evolution—to go 
back, not to go forward; to descend, not to ascend. The 
will which chooses the bad, therefore, is in opposition to 
the will of the universe, that is to say, the Divine Will, 
the Will of God immanent in evolution. 

In order to be free from the tyranny of sin, and in 
order to gain the natural liberty of a will in harmony 
with the will of the universe, there must be, first and fore¬ 
most, a desire for the good. Without that desire the 
will is powerless. But let that desire exist, however feebly 
or intermittently, and the enslaved will is neither helpless 
nor hopeless. Let that desire become the strongest and 
intensest longing of the heart, and not only can the will 
be delivered from its oppression, but a change of the will 
can be brought about so complete, so pervasive of the 
whole being, so creative in power and goodness, that it 
may truly be described as a new birth of the soul. 

No man can sound the depths of his own natural peace, 
or rise to the heights of his own natural bliss, who is not 
conscious of the presence and the companionship of 
God. This consciousness is natural to the soul whose will 
is in harmony with the will of God, but it is impossible to 
the soul -whose will is not converted to the divine will. 
The work of religion is to create a longing for good in 
the soul of man, so that it may escape from the slavery 


6 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


of sins fatal to its own peace, and reach its highest use¬ 
fulness to the purposes of evolution in a direct and 
living consciousness of God. 

Consciousness of God, he holds, is the natural state of 
things. Sin is unnatural, and prevents the natural state 
of things from obtaining. Sin is unnatural in the sense 
that it is the will of the creature opposing itself to the 
will of the Creator. Always it is sin, and only it is sin, 
which blinds the eyes and hardens the heart of mankind. 
It may be the smallest of sins, one of those sins which we 
describe as merely amiable weaknesses; but let it be in 
charge of a soul and directing its course, let it be a sin 
which we find ourselves unable to give up, which we 
recognise as unworthy, and yet cling to, and we are 
living in the cold, we are moving in the shadows, and all 
our faculties are in gyves. 

I think this point of view helps one to understand how it 
is that many people who profess religious beliefs, and even 
devote themselves to religious work, are often so unattrac¬ 
tive, so entirely lacking not only in power, but in charm. 

It would seem that the whole matter turns upon a 
complete unison of the two wills, the divine and the hu¬ 
man. They must both want the same things to happen; 
they must both desire the same qualities, they must both 
be pursuing the same end. Discordance between the will 
of the creature and the will of its Creator results in a 
weakening of the consciousness of God in the heart of the 
creature. Men may live very religiously and yet fail to 
dislodge their will from some form of selfishness which is 
fatal to their possession by the grace of God. They may 
be perfectly pure, and yet vain; or wonderfully gener¬ 
ous with their time and money, yet intolerantly wedded 


ACCORDING TO THY FAITH 


7 


to their own ideas; or they may lay down their lives for 
their religion, and yet never have loved anybody so well 
as themselves. 

Perfectly to realise the divine companionship seems to 
depend solely and exclusively on one act of the will, an act 
which denies all the values of the animal senses, and em¬ 
braces, not only with an absolute and unquestioning sur¬ 
render, but with a profound love and an ardent craving 
for satisfaction, the will of its Creator. Hence at the 
very threshold of the spiritual life one is confronted by 
the challenge of love. No one can proceed far on that 
immortal journey who does not perfectly and most earn¬ 
estly hunger and thirst after the divine excellence, who 
does not long for perfection, and who does not wish with 
all his heart to be rid of every selfishness w’hich disfigures 
character and impoverishes spiritual power. 

It is a hard challenge, but there it is; and one must 
agree that the universe itself is hard. There is not much 
discernible softness in the laws of Nature. Spiritual 
law r s are no less exacting, so far as one can see, than the 
lav r s which appear to govern the material universe. Per¬ 
haps the attribution to the Deity of a softness, a vacilla¬ 
tion, and a sentimentalism wdiich would be contemptible 
in a man, has done far more to weaken in humanity the 
sense of the moral law than the earlier attribution to Him 
of such miserable bad qualities as jealousy, vindictiveness, 
and a gross partiality. 

Moreover, if we are quite honest and rational, must 
we not agree that this spiritual law is just? And if it is 
that, who shall bring a charge against it? History is 
the chronicle of an ascent on the part of man from un¬ 
questioning animalism to a disturbed moral consciousness. 


8 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


Each step has been made by the deliberate choice of man 
between good and evil. No one has told him what is 
good. No hand has guided him from w T hat is evil. First 
for his own safety, and afterwards out of loyalty to the 
past and desire for a nobler future, he has chosen good 
and rejected evil. Further, with each difficult ascent he 
has heightened the demands of good and widened the 
categories of evil. Each Alp of his toilsome ascent has re¬ 
vealed to him a greater height to be reached, a more diffi¬ 
cult peak to be scaled. And the greatest of the sons of 
men, those who have carried the human race on their 
shoulders, have not complained that thus it should be. 

Without this deliberate and unaided election for good 
it is difficult to perceive how any honourable progress 
could have been made in the life of the human race. And 
if our ancestors made that election, and if they opposed 
themselves to all the gross forces of materialism in the 
earliest and roughest ages of the human epic, are we now 
to complain, we whose lot has been rendered compara¬ 
tively so easy by their heroic endurance, that it is a hard 
thing to expect us to choose good rather tlian evil, to 
give our wills to rightness and not to wrongness,, to excel¬ 
lence and not to imperfection? 

The reader must bear in mind that we are not now . 
thinking in any way of rewards and punishments. The 
idea of heaven and hell does not at present enter into our 
thoughts. We are discussing simply the question of indi¬ 
vidual human progress here upon earth. We are asking . 
ourselves, “How can a man ascend from brutality to 
humanity, from weakness to power, from unrest to seren¬ 
ity?” The struggle is a hard one, as each man knows for 
himself, save only those whose souls are doped by the 
swill in the trough of animalism. In order to render 


ACCORDING TO THY FAITH 


9 


that struggle intelligible, and therefore less difficult, we 
are endeavouring, in the spirit of men of science exam¬ 
ining the physical laws of the material universe, to dis¬ 
cover the spiritual laws of the universe of reality. 

In this inquiry we find from the history of mankind 

that ascent is the consequence of desire. The greatest 

of all human words, because it denote 3 the greatest of 

human powers, is the word love—a wo^d which signifies 

desire at its highest intensity. What a man loves w r ith 

all his will he finds it easy to obtain; the struggle entailed 

in getting what we want can be measured, and is abso- 

cf our desire. There is 
• • • • 9 # 
no injustice in the condition, “According to thy faith be it 

done unto thee.” That condition represents, indeed, 
man’s idea of perfect fairness. To hunger and thirst 
after a virtue rightly commands that virtue; half-heart¬ 
edly to wish for a virtue rightly brings only a fragment 
of that virtue into our possession. To obtain a living 
and creating consciousness of the divine companionship 
our wills must desire that blessing to the extremest in¬ 
tensity of love, certainly to the total exclusion of our 
own petty wishes. 

M. Cou 6 confirms the teaching of Dr. Milne Bramwell, 
w T ho told me nearly twenty years ago that auto-suggestion 
can do nothing without desire on the part of the patient. 
M. Coue tells me that his patients cure themselves by be¬ 
lieving in the possibility of their cures, and that this belief 
is strong or weak according to their wish for healing. 
Many people afflicted with even painful diseases do not 
really desire to be cured of them—wherein we may see 
a spiritual parable. In any case, neither hypnotism nor 
auto-suggestion can give to the mind a notion which it 


lutely determined, by the quality 



10 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


does not possess; in each instance desire or tendency must 
be there, and all that hypnotism or auto-suggestion can 
do is to stimulate that desire, to strengthen that tendency. 
“According to thy faith be it done unto thee.” 

This brief attempt to explain in untheological lan¬ 
guage the lines on which my friend works his miracles of 
conversion may help the reader, I hope, to enter with a 
quicker sympathy and a more rational understanding 
into the narratives which follow. I do not think that we 
shall make any serious progress in spiritual experience 
if we continue to use the old phrases of evangelicalism, 
particularly if we merely repeat those phrases without 
thinking what they mean. For example, it is perfectly 
useless for a man to profess his belief that “God is Love,” 
or even to attempt to dwell, however reverently and long¬ 
ingly, on the thought of this divine love, until he grasps 
the idea that love is a word signifying desire or longing; 
then he is able to see that the creation of the universe 
and the ascent of man from animalism are the conse¬ 
quences of a divine desire, a divine longing, and to realise 
that a response to that desire, a response made with real 
intelligence and a grateful hope, is expected of him. 

This familiar phrase, “God is Love,” so familiar that 
very few people think what it means, is fundamental to 
our subject. Science is coming round to the theory of 
evolution formulated by Lamarck, driven to that conver¬ 
sion by the facts of the physical world; and the master 
word of Lamarck’s theory is the word appetency , which 
signifies a craving after the satisfaction of desire. Unless 
there had been in the very stuff out of which the physical 
universe is composed—infinite ages before the appearance 
of protoplasm—this craving for the satisfaction of desire 


ACCORDING TO THY FAITH 


11 


there could have been no creation, no evolution. From 
the inconceivable beginning of this vast universe there was 
desire, and every achievement in evolution has been the 
consequence of desire. 

When a man who believes in the sublime theory of evo¬ 
lution says that God is Love, he means that the Creating 
Spirit of the universe is moved by desire; and the mani¬ 
fest evolution of the earth from ugliness to beauty, and 
of human life from ignorance to knowledge, from weakness 
to power, from selfish vice to unselfish virtue, justifies 
him in defining the desire of this Creating Spirit as a 
craving to bless, a passion to share, a longing to give. 
For such a man virtue means a condition of the human 
will enabling the soul to receive the divine blessing, to 
share the divine power, and to possess itself of the divine 
gift—that greatest of all gifts, the grace of God. 

Religion, then, is the means we employ to quicken the 
will of ascending man, so that he may consciously choose 
good, and choose it with the knowledge that until the 
whole force of his desires are at the back of this volition 
he can never find it easy to maintain the inexorable strug¬ 
gle of evolution. 

How does this view square with the findings of physi¬ 
cal science? Perfectly. The deeper a man goes into the 
unassailable facts of science the brighter grows the ever¬ 
lasting illumination of spiritual truth. Neither philoso¬ 
phy nor theology confirms so strongly as physical science 
the immense fact, perhaps the greatest fact in human 
experience, of conversion. 

Let us look at the most recent conclusions of scientific 
men. It is now held that protoplasm is a late and com¬ 
plex form of life. Long before the appearance of pro- 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


12 

tozoa or bacteria, life was at work in the very stuff of 
which the universe is composed. This work was blindly 
and unconsciously accomplished; life was forced and 
driven, as it were, by the infinite energy of the universe 
to fashion the framework of the visible, tangible, and 
sonorous world. 

For millions of years progress depended entirely upon 
the malleability of life under the influence of this energy; 
that is to say, the compelling power in all change was 
environment. If pliant and sequacious life had not sub¬ 
mitted to the influence of environment the world would 
have been stagnant. Observe with real attention that the 
physical globe itself was responding to these influences— 
the ocean, the surface of the earth, the substance of the 
atmosphere. Science speaks of “the evolution of the 
earth,” and declares that there have been at least six 
“major readjustments of its mass.” It is changing still, 
and apparently will continue to change, making a new 
environment for life with every one of those changes. 
Professor Charles Schuchert tells us with authority that 
our present geography is “grander, more diversified, and 
more beautiful” than any previous geography in the his¬ 
tory of our planet. Beauty and grandeur were not 
wasted on the initial forms of life; they delayed their 
coming till life had become self-conscious, till it could 
consciously respond to their influence. 

With man, whose conscious mind could thus respond 
to the higher influences of grandeur, diversity, and 
beauty, evolution came to a crisis. A new era had opened. 
Henceforth progress was to depend not so much upon 
the power of the environment to shape and mould as on 
the power of the human mind to respond consciously and 
willingly to that environment. Life became not the slave, 


ACCORDING TO THY FAITH 


13 


but the partner of the infinite energy. Evolution is a 
progress by which life gradually grows out of domination 
by its environment, and becomes able to dominate that en¬ 
vironment by working in association with its laws. “We 
master Nature by obeying her.” 

This, in brief, is the modern scientific view of evolu¬ 
tion. Men no longer believe in a special creation or in an 
accidental universe. They believe in an evolution brought 
about by the pressure of natural forces (environment) 
and by a response to that pressure on the part of the 
living organism. Professor James Simpson, who admir¬ 
ably and thoroughly summarises the latest views of physi¬ 
cal science in Man and the Attainment of Immortality , 
speaks of “purpose or desire” immanent in evolution. I 
will quote two passages from his book: 

The idea of a preconceived plan elaborated in detail 
is replaced by that of a purpose or desire on a clear 
yet broad scale; but a purpose can only be attained 
through the establishment of freedom. In organic 
life, and indeed in the evolutionary forms as a whole, 
we have a series of facts which, apart from a teleo¬ 
logical interpretation, really mean nothing. . . . Things 
are because of their significance. An account, however 
detailed, of a human tear, in terms of the conception of it 
as a watery secretion from the lachrymal glands, would be 
incomplete to the degree of meaninglessness without some 
reference to the emotion of joy or sorrow of which it was 
an expression. 

With this reasonable view of the physical universe as 
an expression of desire on the part of the Infinite Energy, 
he looks at man, of whom it can be “firmly established 
that he is an integral part of the world process, so inte- 


14 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


gral that it almost looks as if it had required the whole 
long process from Cambrian days to the Pliocene to 
evolve him,” and comes to this rational conclusion: 

Man, thus standing in direct organic relation with the 
world process, will prove that there is something about 
it which is kin to him. If he is its growing point—that 
element or organ by which Nature becomes conscious of, 
and best reveals, herself—then everything that is charac¬ 
teristic of man at his noblest is predicable of her in some 
kind of way. Just because of that very intimate relation 
of him to the process it follows that his highest character¬ 
istics are not altogether unrelated to the process itself, and 
it is at least probable that the characters displayed in this 
highest product are transcended in the producing Cause 
or Ground. Thus to argue may seem to be illegitimate 
in the sense that it is an inference from the part to the 
whole; but the criticism fails where that whole stands in 
a genetic relationship to the part. 

Now, it is clear that if man is descended, not merely 
from one of the Primates, but from the very stuff of which 
the universe is composed—“Under every grave lies a 
World History”—he must have it in him either to with¬ 
stand or to accept the influence of environment. His 
place in the universe, indeed, is the direct result of his 
response to environment. Evolution, as Professor Simp¬ 
son says, is a policeman who constantly tells the proces¬ 
sion of the human race to move on and to move up. Those 
who are conscious of purpose in the universe, those who 
perceive that environment “in its ultimate aspect is God,” 
obey that order, and moving on and moving up, develop 
an intense spiritual consciousness, and so advance the 
fortunes of mankind. But those who see nothing of 


ACCORDING TO THY FAITH 


15 


grandeur, diversity, and beauty in the universe, those who 
deny with all the logical force of the animal instincts that 
self-sacrifice is a higher thing than self-indulgence, and 
who are content with a morality which keeps them out 
of the police-court, refuse to obey the order of evolution, 
and themselves arrest and put under restraint their spirit¬ 
ual growth. 

This is the whole story of the human race. Some men 
respond to the call of the End, some to the memory of the 
Beginning. When we say that “righteousness exalteth a 
nation,” we mean that a nation which continually 
heightens the demands of morality will advance, while a 
nation which lowers those demands will go back. History 
confirms this view of nations. The physician tells us 
that it is true of the individual. The good man has a 
higher survival value than the bad man. No one will 
contend that vice (which is simply a return to the animal 
past) is a good thing either for health or character. All 
of us, as Dante saw, apprehend, however dimly, a bliss 
transcending sensual delights. Epictetus taught us to live 
like a sailor ashore, who ever listens for a call from his 
ship. Victor Hugo bade the soul to regard itself here 
only as a perching bird. 

Be as the bird, that halting in her flight 
Awhile in boughs too slight, 

Feels them give way beneath her and yet sings. 
Knowing that she hath wings. 

In perfect accordance with the findings of modern 
science, religion teaches men to press forward from the 
material influences of the past, and to submit themselves, 
thankfully and rejoicingly, to the spiritual influences of 


16 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


the future. It is an agent of evolution, created by evolu¬ 
tion, and subjected to evolution. It has a history, like the 
structure of man, or like the geography of our planet. It 
began in the valley of superstition; it rose to the little 
hills of self-denying morality; it is now ascending to the 
mountain-peaks of acquiescence and love. Its future is 
the future of mankind. 

So far the findings of science and religion are akin; 
but in one particular religion far outstrips laborious 
science in its evolution towards the ultimate truth of life. 
It teaches, and proves, that a man who has opposed him¬ 
self tooth and nail to the pressure of evolution and to 
the influence of environment, who has not only returned 
to the animal, but who has made himself a bad animal, 
an animal so bad that, as in the case of the dipsoma¬ 
niac, medical science pronounces him to be hopeless and 
incurable, may, in the twinkling of an eye, lose the 
terrific appetites of his degradation, and become a new 
man. 

This is not a theory of a theologian. It is one of the 
facts of religious experience. It is, indeed, a truth of 
human life as fixed, as eminent, as indestructible, as any 
truth of physical science. And it witnesses as much to the 
truth of physical science as to the truth of religion. For 
it signifies that growth, development, and progress are 
determined by the response made by life to those influences 
in the universe which from the beginnings of existence 
have been pressing forward to the fulfilment of the Crea¬ 
tive Will, from the mean to the great, from the partial to 
the complete, from the discordant to the harmonious. 
The good man travels on the tide of God’s purpose; 
the bad man opposes himself to all the forces of evolu¬ 
tion—he would go back to the past. Let him then turn 


ACCORDING TO THY FAITH 


17 


about and the very waves which are overwhelming him 
will sweep him forward to his rightful goal. 

Before turning to the narratives which witness to the 
power of a particular method to effect conversion, I think 
it essential to explain in what manner—as I see it, not as 
F. B. sees it—the Christ of the Christian religion enters 
into these miracles. 

It is quite certain, in my opinion, that a man can be 
turned from sin, and can experience that merciful change 
of heart and v^ill which we call a new birth with no actual 
reference to any of the orthodox dogmas of the Christian 
religion. 'Merely by convincing him that his will is at 
variance with the will of God, and that so long as his will 
insists upon opposing itself to the will of his Creator he 
can never experience consciousness of the divine reality, 
it is possible, provided always that the desire for goodness 
is genuine and strong, to create in that man a new 
spirit. 

“Professor Leuba is undoubtedly right,” says William 
James, “in contending that the conceptual belief about 
Christ’s work, although so often efficacious and antece¬ 
dent, is really accessory and non-essential, and that the 
‘joyous conviction’ can also come by far older channels 
than this conception.” 

There is no need, as there was no need in the days of 
Jesus, to present a complete and dogmatic theology to 
the mind of the seeker. Love of God is still the first com¬ 
mandment. Love of God and love of man are still the only 
essentials. It may be true, or it may not be true, that 
God repented of His creation, that Christ came upon 
earth to make atonement between God and Man, and that 
because of the sufferings of Christ God is now willing 
to accept our hearty repentance for our sins. These 


18 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


teachings may be true or untrue, but their acceptance 
is not essential to the great and wonderful spiritual ex¬ 
perience of conversion. 

Yet Christ enters into all these conversions. It is 
He who inspires the work. It is He who authorises the 
teaching. It is He who encourages the seeker to believe 
and the abandoned to hope. Jesus need not be described 
as the “Redeemer,” need not be explained as the “Pro¬ 
pitiation” for the sins of the whole world, need not be 
commended as our “Advocate” with the Father. It is 
sufficient to teach with His teaching. Love of God—the 
will conformed to the will of God, the heart hungering 
and thirsting after God, the affections of the mind set 
upon the things of God—this is sufficient to deliver the 
soul from its sins; and this is the heart and centre of the 
Galilean revelation. 

In all this the spirit of Jesus is manifest. For not only 
is the teaching His teaching, but in Him as in no other 
being who has ever lifted up the face of man from the 
dust we behold the Will of God, the divine Will which 
has brought creation into existence and set in motion the 
laws of the spiritual universe. He impersonates for us the 
inconceivable, the unimaginable, the infinite. He human¬ 
ises the superhuman, He leads us so convincingly out 
of the delusions of the visible and so confidently into the 
realities of the invisible that truly we can say of Him, 
He came from God. 

With this understood, one can proceed to the narra¬ 
tives; but I would leave in the mind of the reader as a 
final word on the method of F. B. that the distinguishing 
characteristic of his work is the exclusive and pathologi¬ 
cal emphasis he lays on the power of sin to rob a man’s 


ACCORDING TO THY FAITH 


19 


soul of its natural health—sin being understood, not 
merely as great vices, but as any motion in the will con¬ 
trary to such excellence as that soul might reach by a 
genuine desire for spiritual evolution. 

The question asked of man by the universe is not 
“What do you believe?” but “What do you love?” Any 
man who makes honest answer to that simple question can 
determine his own value to the universe, his exact place in 
the stages of evolution. 


CHAPTER II 


THE SOUL SURGEON 

A S I have already hinted, the impressive thing in F. 

B. is that a man so unimpressive can work mira¬ 
cles—miracles which would seem to demand extraordinary 
qualities of mind. He helps one to believe that truth 
may yet be an even greater force in human affairs than 
personality. 

In appearance he is a young-looking man of middle 
life, tall, upright, stoutish, clean-shaven, spectacled, with 
that mien of scrupulous, shampooed, and almost medical 
cleanness, or freshness, which is so characteristic of the 
hygienic American. 

His carriage and his gestures are distinguished by an 
invariable alertness. He never droops, he never slouches. 
You find him in the small hours of the morning with the 
same quickness of eye and the same athletic erectness of 
body which seem to bring a breeze into the breakfast- 
room. Few men so quiet and restrained exhale a spirit 
of such contagious well-being. 

A slight American accent marks his speech, and is 
perhaps richly noticeable only when he makes use of 
American colloquialisms. The voice is low but vigorous, 
with a sincere ring of friendliness and good humour—the 

same friendliness and good-humour which are character- 

20 


THE SOUL SURGEON 


21 


istic of his manners. He strikes one on a first meeting as 
a warm-hearted and very happy man, who can never know 
what it is to be either physically tired or mentally bored. 
I am tempted to think that if Mr. Pickwick had given 
birth to a son, and that son had emigrated in boyhood to 
America, he would have been not unlike this amiable and 
friendly surgeon of souls. 

Fuller acquaintance with F. B. brings to one’s mind the 
knowledge that in spite of his boyish cheerfulness he is 
of the house and lineage of all true mystics, from Plotinus 
to Tolstoy. His mysticism, indeed, might suggest even 
a surrender to superstition. He attributes, without ques¬ 
tion, to the Deity certain motions in himself which another 
might well assign to movements of his own unconscious¬ 
ness. For example, it is his habit to wake very early from 
sleep, and to devote an hour or more to complete silence 
of soul and body; in this silence he is listening for the 
voice from heaven, and the voice comes to him, and he 
receives his orders for the day—he is to write to one 
man, he is to call upon another, and so on. Psychologists 
would tell him that those orders proceed from his own un¬ 
consciousness, and are the fruit of sleep’s mentation, the 
harvest of his yesterday’s thoughts and solicitudes. 

Such an explanation, of course, does not rob these mo¬ 
tions of their spiritual value. But it is an explanation, I 
think, which may help those whose conception of the Deity 
entirely prevents them from believing either in His inter¬ 
position or His colloquies with the human soul. It may 
help such as these to realise that a sincere acquiescence in 
the divine Will may enable the human will more perfectly 
to apprehend the spiritual influences of its environment, 
and to act more concordantly upon the intuitions of its 


22 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


own spirit. Mystery remains; but it is a mystery which 
neither detracts from the unimaginable glory of God nor 
degrades the human spirit to the mechanical level of a 
gramophone. 

The mysticism of F. B. shows itself more normally, 
and one might almost say more old-fashionedly, in his 
unquestioning conviction that there is a blessing in read¬ 
ing the Bible (quite apart from the literary blessing of 
feeding the mind on such beautiful English), and also in 
his faith that sincere prayer, even for material help, is 
constantly answered. But his great emphasis, I think, 
is laid on spiritual silence, and the article of his faith 
which more than any other seems to give him his unique 
power is the mystical notion that in every man there is 
“a piece of divinity” hungering and thirsting for expres¬ 
sion, a piece of divinity which best makes its presence felt 
to the soul in periods of silence. 

He sees a significant parable in the scriptural incident 
of the blind man healed by the touch of Jesus. At the 
first touch of those gentle fingers the blind saw men walk¬ 
ing as trees; at the second he saw “every man clearly.” 
F. B. tells those who come to him that so long as they 
see men in the mass, see them as a forest, their spiritual 
eyes are only half opened; to see them individually, man 
by man, and each man a piece of divinity, an heir of 
eternal life, requires the second touch of the spiritual 
hand—the miracle of conversion. 

One of the phrases he never tires of hammering into 
the minds of those who desire to help the progress of men 
religiously is borrowed, I believe, from the Japanese: “It’s 
no use throwing eye-medicine out of a two-storey win¬ 
dow.” Drop by drop, and with the utmost precision, the 


THE SOUL SURGEON 


23 


extremest care, the medicine of God must be directed to 
the individual soul. He holds that little good is done by 
the extravagant methods of so many religious organisa¬ 
tions to make Christians of men in the mass. He goes 
even further than this, with much experience to justify 
him, and teaches that numbers of those who are thus so 
heroically but vainly striving to Christianise the multi¬ 
tudes are themselves strangers to the central power and 
mystery of the Christian religion. Let me say at once 
that no small part of his busy life is devoted to the con¬ 
version of religious teachers, many of whom continue 
his fervent and grateful disciples. 

How he came by this conviction of the personal charac¬ 
ter of religion, this intense conviction which drives him 
so earnestly and successfully on his happy way—for he 
is a man of extreme happiness—may appear in the fol¬ 
lowing brief narrative of his life. 

He was born in America, and at the age of twenty- 
four was ordained into the ministry of a Protestant 
Church. A theological student at his seminary had ac¬ 
cused him of ambition, and to correct any tendency in 
that course F. B. chose a most difficult quarter of New 
York for his initial labours. He was moderately suc¬ 
cessful in his work, but was conscious of an inner hin¬ 
drance, a something in himself which prevented the great 
message of Christianity from “getting through.” He 
spent a year as a missionary in the Near East, and in 
1908 paid a visit to England with the express intention 
of attending the religious convention at Keswick. Here 
the miracle occurred which so altered his life that ever 
since he has been able to show a great host of people how 
they may obtain a like reconstruction. 

Weary of himself, but not yet sick of asking what he 


24 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


was, and what he ought to be, this young American one 
day entered a little village church in Cumberland, under 
whose humble roof was gathered a congregation of seven¬ 
teen people. The service was taken by a woman. “My 
feelings,” F. B. has told me, “were very unhappy; I won’t 
call them despairing; they were just feelings of great un¬ 
happiness. Grudges against certain religious people were 
there in my mind, fermenting; I felt that I could justly 
accuse those men of hard-heartedness, high-handedness, 
bigotry. They had always seemed to be opposing me— 
opposing my work. Yet the main cause of my disquiet 
was the knowledge of my own heart that it was guilty of 
three things, sticking there like glue, stopping all the free 
working of the generosity and happiness I longed to ex¬ 
perience—selfishness, pride, ill-will. These three things 
were in my blood—selfishness, pride, ill-will; I could not 
get rid of them; while they were there I knew that the 
better part of me couldn’t function as it ought. Think 
of it—selfishness, pride, ill-will; and I called myself a 
Christian, tried to make other people Christians!” 

The woman preacher—F. B. does not know her name 
—spoke of some particular aspect of the cross—he does 
not now recall precisely what that aspect was, but he says 
that in some manner for which he cannot account her 
quite simple words “personalised the Cross,” and that 
while he brooded on this idea in a reverie of mind there 
came to him, very palpably and with a most poignant 
realism, albeit with no suddenness, no dramatic intensity, 
a vision of the Crucified. 

He was conscious at once of two shuddering realisa¬ 
tions—the realisation of a great abyss between him and 
the suffering Christ, the realisation of an infinite sorrow 
in the face of his Master. These realisations dissipated 




THE SOUL SURGEON 


25 


the chaos in his mind. There was now no hesitancy, no 
feeling of a divided will, no sense of calculation and argu¬ 
ment ; a wave of strong emotion, rising up within him from 
the depths of his estranged spiritual life, seemed, as it 
were, to lift his soul from its anchorage of selfishness and 
to bear it across that great sundering abyss to the foot 
of the Cross. There he made his surrender to the divine 
Will; there he lost all sense of oppression and helplessness. 
It was the work of a moment, and a gesture of his spirit 
invisible to human eyes. 

I asked him to recall if he could the physical sensa¬ 
tions of that moment of surrender, so that the reality 
of his experience might not fade from my mind, in the 
rather conventional language of revivalism. How would 
he describe to a doctor what happened to him? How 
would he tell that experience to a man who had never 
heard of Jesus? 

He said, “I remember one sensation very distinctly; 
it was a vibrant feeling up and down the spine, as if a 
strong current of life had suddenly been poured into me. 
That followed on my surrender. No; it came at the same 
time. It was instantaneous.” 

What followed on this sensation of an electric current, 
he remembers, was the dazed feeling of “a great shaking 
up.” He sat for some moments in a certain confusion of 
mind, not trembling in the body, but conscious of a long 
vibration in his soul, as though it was still throbbing 
under the shock of this new experience. There was no 
immediate feeling of lightness, no rejoicing sense of de¬ 
liverance and liberation. He was conscious of a very 
mighty change in himself, but for some time could only 
think of that change in terms of its physical effects. 


26 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


He returned to the house at which he was staying, and 
told at the table of his hostess what had happened to him. 
He related this experience in simple language, and with 
no emotion, relating it, however, with the natural pleasure 
of one who has made an important discovery. There was 
a Cambridge man staying in the house, and after luncheon 
this man asked F. B. to go for a walk with him. They 
walked for some hours round the lake, and it was during 
this walk that both illumination and relief came to the 
surgeon of souls. He said, in his explanation to the other, 
that to keep his sense of the divine his heart must be 
empty of all sin, of every vestige of his discordant past. 
There and then he decided to write six letters to those 
men in America against whom he had long borne a justi¬ 
fiable grudge, letters acknowledging his ill-will towards 
them, asking them for their forgiveness, and proffering 
his friendship. 

The relief which came to him with this decision had a 
determining effect on his life; it taught him to believe that 
there can be no living and transforming sense of unity 
with the divine Will, no “God Consciousness” as he calls 
it, so long as the heart is clogged and smothered by any 
obstinate trace of selfishness. There must be open con¬ 
fession, complete and unequivocating restitution. 

The fact that he received no replies to his letters did 
not daunt the happiness which had now come to him from 
his unbroken sense of the divine companionship. That 
fact made him realise all the more sharply how hard it is 
—nay, but impossible—for a proud heart, however virtu¬ 
ous, to enter into the kingdom of love. Moreover, his 
walk by the lakeside had brought illumination to another 
man, and now the way was clear before his feet. He had 
been changed; he could be the means of changing others. 



THE SOUL SURGEON 


27 


The logic of this conversion can be expressed in very 
simple language, and in language which no man of science 
who has the smallest practical acquaintance with experi¬ 
mental psychology will feel it in his heart to resent. 

A will which is divided, which is conscious of opposite 
tuggings, which is never able to give itself freely either 
in the one direction or the other, obviously cannot func¬ 
tion in the only way proper to a will. It is in a condition 
fatal to its health, fatal to its nature. Like a muscle 
seldom exercised, it is on the way to atrophy. One may 
indeed find it difficult to explain how a will which is not 
actuated by self-determination—a glad, rejoicing, and 
never challenged self-determination—can be thought of 
in any terms of volition, can be named a will. 

A man who carries about with him such a will as this 
obviously cannot be a happy man. In the sphere of the 
intellect he may make shift with unsettled opinions, and, 
like the famous bishop of Browning, exercise his comfort¬ 
able choice between a life of faith diversified by doubt 
and a life of doubt diversified by faith. But this will not 
do in the sphere of action—the true sphere of the will. A 
man cannot say to himself with any reasonable prospect 
of happiness, “I will live a life of love diversified by hate,” 
or “I will devote some of my time to seeking truth, and 
some of it to propagating error.” On the face of it, 
peace of mind demands a coherent will. The will must 
be doing what it wants to do—be it good or evil—if it 
is to be unconscious of hindrance. 

It is plain to us that the distressed condition of F. B.’s 
mind was a consequence of his divided will. He half- 
wanted to do a thing, and he half-wanted not to do that 
thing. Whether the vision in the little Cumberland 
church was subjective or objective, whether it was a genu- 


28 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


ine apparition—that is to say, an operation of spiritual 
law not yet investigated by the human mind—or a sudden 
obedience of the physical senses to a morbid pressure of 
nervous energy, does not seem to me of great importance. 
The fact which appears salient, and hopeful of intelligent 
understanding, is the fact that this suffering mind was 
immediately healed by a decision definitely and absolutely 
to exercise its will henceforth in one single direction. 

There is here no argument for religion. A man half- 
afraid to go to the devil might find himself delivered from 
distress of mind by flinging aside his former hesitancies 
and entering with a whole heart and a whole will into the 
satanic service. The point is that all success demands 
the will at the back of it. A man cannot be happy in a 
life of vice so long as he is conscious of moral scruples; 
and a man cannot be happy in a life of virtue so long as 
any of his inclinations bear him towards vice. The de¬ 
mand of both God and Satan is identical—the whole 
heart. 

The deepest thing in our nature, said William James, 
is this dumb region of the heart in wdiich we dwell alone 
with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses; “in these 
depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds 
and decisions take their rise.” 

This is psychology—the psychology of world history, 
the psychology of every man’s experience. We may hold 
this same clue in our hands as we go forward to consider 
the second stage in the conversion of F. B. He found that 
a great happiness came to him with the decision to exert 
his unified will in the service of One wdio proclaimed the 
reality of the spiritual w^orld, and pronounced the values 


THE SOUL SURGEON 


29 


of instinctive materialism to be illusions. He discovered, 
in describing this experience to another man, that what 
had hindered him from long ago making this decision was 
sin. Sin is a theological term, but it is also a practical 
term—a term of world history, a term of every man’s ex¬ 
perience. It signifies error. 

Sin is that which hinders the evolution of the human 
race and the growth of the individual man. It may be 
drunkenness or a false theory in art. It may be murder 
or pride; it may be dishonesty or intolerance. It is any¬ 
thing which impoverishes spiritual power, and deflects the 
personality from fulfilling its highest purposes. Per¬ 
haps it is best seen in its effect on a State. “What is the 
German suffering from,” asked Professor Hobhouse dur¬ 
ing the war, “but a great illusion that the State is some¬ 
thing more than man, and that power is more than jus¬ 
tice?” Sin brought the glory of Babylonia to the dust. 
Sin dug the grave of Athens. Sin destroyed so majestic 
a political experiment as the Homan Empire. Sin—the 
sin of unconscionable greed wedded to a piety that was 
either traditional or insincere where it was not actually 
hypocritical—corrupted the industrial achievements of 
England in the nineteenth century, and left us a heri¬ 
tage of social problems not yet solved. What sin has 
done, and is still doing, for Russia, Ireland, Greece, and 
Turkey, let every man judge for himself. 

Another palpable aspect of sin is to be seen in those in¬ 
stitutions of civilisation which law and charity erect either 
for the punishment or the curing of its victims. How 
many millions of money are spent in every chief country 
of the world on prisons and police-systems, on lunatic 
asylums and hospitals, and how many men and women 


30 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


wasted in staffing them? Is not the philanthropy of 
mankind saddled with huge and increasing liabilities for 
the children of neglectful and even cruel parents? Are 
not the navies and armies of Europe, the expense of 
which presses so heavily on the industrial, political, and 
domestic life of nations, witnesses to a state of mind 
wholly at variance with an unbestial outlook? No man 
will argue either that sin is not responsible for by far the 
greater part of national expenditure, or that a State 
would not be in a better position to explore the future of 
mankind if it were not for its multitudes of sinners. 1 Is 

it not enough for us that we speak of a particularly con- 

» 

temptible sinner as a “degenerate”? 

In the same fashion, sin operates disastrously in the 
individual. Its effect is represented by all those motions 
of his will towards things which offer no ultimate satisfac¬ 
tion to his nature. It stands in his life for hindrance and 
impediment. It is best described, perhaps, as mutiny 
towards evolution. The sinner is like a cell in the body 
which refuses to grow; it is the cancer of spiritual life. 
A man cannot do his duty towards the world who is not 
growing away from that world’s past. The immense em¬ 
phasis laid on sin by religion is justified by the interests 
of civilisation. The easy forgiveness of sin promised by 
some of the great Churches of the Christian religion is 
as perilous to those high interests of civilisation as the 
thousand enticements of a sensual materialism. 

All this, I think, will be accepted by most men. The 
question remains, How are we to get rid of sin? How 

1 The cost to Great Britain for the year ending March, 1921, of 
Law, Justice, Health Insurance, Poor Relief, Reformatories, Child 
Welfare, Inebriates, and Lunatics exceeded £80,000,000. 


THE SOUL SURGEON 


31 


are we to free our wills from the fettering of the past? 
It is here that F. B. seems to help us. He says that the 
degree of our immunity from moral disease is governed 
absolutely by the degree of our desire for moral health. 
If we complain that we are slaves to sin, we confess that 
we desire sin. If we say that at certain times we are 
overtaken by sin, we proclaim that we are not travelling 
on the road of virtue. Sin is neither footpad nor assas¬ 
sin ; it lives, and can only live, in the heart which does 
not love goodness with all its strength, with all its earn¬ 
estness, and with all its appetency. 

He came by this conviction in a manner calculated 
to make an ineffaceable impression on his mind. Soon 
after his conversion he devoted himself with great enthu¬ 
siasm to the work of educating in the knowledge of per¬ 
sonal religion theological students and other young men 
following in various ways the religious life. His idea was 
to help these eager and noble disciples of his Master to 
be more successful in their sacred work, to teach them 
how they should lay their main emphasis on personal re¬ 
ligion, and how they should guard themselves against the 
destroying influences of ecclesiastical mechanism. But, 
at the very threshold of this new experience he encoun¬ 
tered the old enemy. There, in the heart of even the theo¬ 
logical student, he found this old enemy deeply en¬ 
trenched, sin in one form or another holding the citadel 
against all the elegant deployments of divinity. In secret 
the theological student was fighting his sin—perhaps one 
of those secret sins which prey on spiritual vitality and 
attack so destructively the sensitive nerve of a man’s self- 
respect; he was fighting it in various ways, orthodox 
ways, but fighting it in vain. 

Then came enlightenment from F. B. That despised 


32 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


sin could not so tremendously afflict him if he loved good¬ 
ness. Its strength was not great; the feebleness of the 
victim’s desire for God alone enabled it to play the part 
of tyrant; it would disappear as if it had never been im¬ 
mediately he craved for righteousness with his whole 
heart, his whole spirit. Then followed a new understand¬ 
ing of the great teaching, “Blessed are the pure in heart , 
for they shall see God .” 

One of the men who has been constantly in the society 
of F. B., who has gone with him on missions to many 
countries in the East as well as to most countries in 
Europe, spoke to me of the wonderful effect produced 
by this honest teaching. 

“A man,” he said, “who hides from the knowledge of 
the world a secret sin may go and confess it to a priest, 
but except for the mental relief of confession there is sel¬ 
dom great spiritual benefit; still more seldom is there a 
new birth. The reason is, as F. B. teaches us, that the 
sufferer is only ashed if he repents of his sin; he is not 
subjected to a merciless cross-examination. At the mo¬ 
ment of his confession he does repent; he is there on his 
knees because he hates that sin, and wants to be free of 
it; therefore, quite truthfully, he replies to the question 
whether he repents of his sin with a pathetic affirmative 
and he is forgiven. Perhaps after the forgiveness there 
is a word or two on attending church services, saying his 
prayers, and reading certain books. But the man goes 
out from confession with the root of disease still in his 
heart. 

“Now with F. it is quite different. He would regard 
such a man as this with real hope. He often says that a 
person in pain can easily be healed; it is the person asleep 


THE SOUL SURGEON 


33 


who tries him hardest. He deals with the secret sinner 
not emotionally, not credally. He tells him that his sin 
is ‘walling him in from God.’ He exposes it as a deliber¬ 
ate structure of the man’s will raised against conscious¬ 
ness of God. The man may protest that he desires this 
consciousness of God, prays for it, hungers for it, that his 
whole life is directed to acquiring it. F. tells him that he 
is deceiving himself. He says, ‘God comes to us when we 
ask Him.’ If the man again protests that he has asked 
God again and again to come to him, F. asks, ‘With your 
whole will?’ Then he explains that the sufferer is at¬ 
tempting to lie to himself, as well as to God, and that it is 
only disease, this secret sin, which could make him so 
foolish. From that he proceeds to getting the sin into 
the open, and showing it to its victim in all its horror and 
loathsomeness. He uses the knife, for he is a surgeon and 
no dispenser of drugs. He doesn’t believe in narcotics; 
he believes in eradicating the disease, cutting it clean out 
by the roots. He is terribly incisive, in love. He makes 
you hate your sin, almost yourself, but he makes you feel 
he cares for you all the time. After this it is a matter for 
the man’s will. Hatred of his sin, and a real longing to 
be rid of it, a real longing for freedom and health accom¬ 
panied by a passionate craving for the consciousness of 
God in his soul, sooner or later, very often immediately, 
will give him a new will. It is F.’s ruthless insistence on 
sin as an act of the will, a deliberate act, an act of the 
affections, which rouses men in this case to confront the 
truth of their condition. 

“Finally, when he has -done his work as a surgeon, he 
becomes a physican. He tells men whom he has thus 
awakened from sleep or delivered from disease that they 
may very easily, all the same, become spiritually liverish, 


34 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


and spiritually feeble, and spiritually rheumatic, unless 
they exercise their spiritual qualities. So he makes them, 
whatever their professions are or may be, helpers of other 
men, savers of other souls. In one way or another they 
have to be living unselfishly for the highest sake of other 
people. It is in that life, he tells them, they will find their 
greatest happiness, because it is only in such a life 
that man can enjoy an uninterrupted consciousness of 
God.” 

F. B. says that anything is sin which prevents him 
from being a miracle-worker. He teaches that it is neces¬ 
sary to hate sin, forsake sin, confess sin, and to make 
restitution. “This is taking a daily spiritual bath.” The 
heart must be cleansed of all iniquity. 

One whose life has been changed by him, and w T ho is 
now changing others in a remarkable manner, describes 
the theory of F. B. in the following way: “There are 
two seas in Palestine, one in the north teeming with life— 
fish, fruit, crops, birds, flowers, life of all kinds. In the 
south is the Dead Sea—no fish, no fruit, no flowers, no 
houses, no life of any kind. What is the reason for the 
difference? The Sea of Galilee has a river flowing into 
it, and a river flowing out of it. The Dead Sea has the 
same river flowing into it, but none flowing out.” 

It is a good figure. Science and philosophy will not 
quarrel with it. A mind which receives and gives is a 
Sea of Galilee; a mind which receives, but gives nothing 
out, is a Dead Sea. It is a law of our nature that we 
enrich ourselves by sharing with others the accumulations 
of our activities, be they intellectual or material. The 
miser of wealth or knowledge punishes no man so heavily 
as himself. 


THE SOUL SURGEON 


35 


The reader will perceive, then, that F. B. has com¬ 
mon sense and the experience of the human race on the 
side of his method. He tells men that if they would be 
happy and undistracted they must be whole-hearted . His 
phrase “God Consciousness” may be translated into “ap¬ 
prehension of the truth,” for the highest of which a man 
is capable is truth. His hours of silence, “listening to 
God,” may be seen as meditation, when the mind listens to 
the voice of that higher nature which every normal man 
possesses in himself, and which is the driving force in evo¬ 
lution. Further, his teaching that we must hate whatever 
frustrates our growth, and crave with our entire will for 
those things which increase our powers, is a teaching 
which needs no religious sanction for the reasonableness 
of its demands. 

Every man, therefore, may make trial of this method, 
whatever his religious opinions. Every man who desires 
to grow, every man who desires peace of heart and 
strength of mind, may test the truth of this method in his 
own life, without reference to any religion. But no man 
who thus genuinely endeavours to test this teaching will 
be able to doubt in the end that by discovering and pro¬ 
claiming this law of man’s spiritual nature Jesus, ipso 
facto , revealed himself as the incarnation of universal 
truth. 

In the conclusion to this book I shall invite the reader 
to ask himself what light is shed on the difficult question 
of man’s immortality by F. B.’s interpretation of the 
Christian thesis. For the present, it is wiser to restrict 
our view to this difficult and perplexing planet, and to 
observe how a system of rewards and punishments oper¬ 
ates in the domestic life of mortal man. The narratives 
which follow prove quite conclusively that here upon 


36 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


earth the lover of the good, the true, and the beautiful 
reaps a harvest of wheat, while the lover of the base, the 
false, and the hideous reaps a harvest, not only of tares, 
but of thorns. 

As a preface to these narratives I will conclude the 
present chapter with an explanation of F. B.’s work in 
the universities of the world. 

Two Anglican bishops in the East, greatly struck by 
the extraordinary effect of F. B.’s personal revivalism 
among missionaries, asked him to pay a visit to their 
sons in Cambridge. They were anxious that these two 
boys should know F. B.’s idea of religion on the threshold 
of their manhood. That visit revealed to F. B. a very 
distressing state of things in the colleges of the Univer¬ 
sity. He called a few of his followers to his side, and 
began a private work, to all intents and purposes a con¬ 
versational work, among the undergraduates of Cam¬ 
bridge. 

On his return to the United States he set a similar 
work in motion among the various American universities. 
Then, paying another visit to England, he brought back 
with him some of the American undergraduates who had 
become converted; and, returning once more to America, 
took with him English undergraduates w r ho had undergone 
a like experience. 

In this work he is engaged at the present moment, and 
he believes that a new knowledge of religion is spread¬ 
ing among men who may exercise a strong influence on 
English-speaking civilisation during the next fifty years. 
Some of these men more or less share his theological opin¬ 
ions ; some are opposed to them; all, however, are agreed 
that he has changed their lives, and regard him with an 


THE SOUL SURGEON 


37 


affection which is one of many proofs I possess that his 
goodness has the true character of divinity—it is lovable* 

Therefore to thee it was given 
Many to save with thyself; 

And at the end of thy day 
O faithful shepherd! to come. 

Bringing thy sheep in thy hand. 


CHAPTER III 


GREATS 

T HE writer of the following narrative is a man twenty- 
four years of age. He is regarded by many good 
judges as a scholar who may quite possibly make a valu¬ 
able contribution to philosophy. 

His narrative was written during a busy time in one 
of the German universities. It was chiefly intended as a 
note for my guidance. Its interest, however, seems to 
me so considerable that I have decided to publish it with¬ 
out interruption. The reader must bear in mind that the 
writer possesses in a very eminent manner the tentative 
and balancing mind of a “Greats” man. It will be neces¬ 
sary to make a certain allowance for his antipathetic 
attitude towards F. B. and also to read between the lines 
at those crucial moments in the narrative where feeling 
is vigorously suppressed, and reason, shrinking from a 
statement of the emotions, escapes from expression in a 
string of dots. The reader, I hope, will be able to imagine 
what those dots signify when he knows that this man has 
suffered very deeply, that through all his sufferings he 
has kept his courage, and that the most impressive quality 
of his courage is its unsparing honesty. 

Let me say that one of the reasons which induces me 
to publish the narrative in its original form is the con¬ 
viction that F. B. will not be able to read so courageous 

38 


GREATS 


39 


and appealing a statement without seeing that his influ¬ 
ence is wholly independent of his theology. If one could 
set the spirit free from all man-invented forms, how soon 
might religion arise from its death-bed to save the world 
from the destructive delusions of materialism. 

The Narrative 

This is nothing more than a contribution towards in¬ 
vestigating one particular phenomenon—the influence of 
F. B. And as the most striking feature of his work is 
that he addresses no monster meetings and writes no 
books himself, personal reminiscences are the only means 
available to estimate the aims and value of his work. 

It will have been made clear already to the reader that 
F. B. is at least a remarkable personality, and as such 
possesses the gift of producing violent reactions in those 
with whom he comes into contact. There are few men 
among those who know him at all well who do not feel 
either an intense liking or an intense dislike for him; who 
are not by turns surprised, admiring, disappointed, en¬ 
thusiastic, disgusted, afraid, or scornful of this appar¬ 
ently commonplace American. This is a very great 
hindrance to a fair estimate of him. I must, therefore, 
say at the outset that I write this as far as possible “in 
a cool hour,” after living for nearly six months entirely 
out of the range of his influence and out of the sound of 
his name. 

Perhaps a personality may be thought of as a piece 
of cord tossed from Norn to Norn, as the old Germans 
imagined it. Life at least seems to be an interplay of 
elemental forces, which come to the fore one after another 
in the time-order, but must work ever with a material 
which is never quite formless. 


40 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


If Wordsworth’s conviction—which is also mine—be 
correct, then not even the parents of a new-born child 
have a perfectly plastic soul before them to form as they 
will. 

My father was the vicar of a small town in East 
Anglia—Cromwell’s East Anglia, where the Protestant 
tradition lies still deep in the heart of the people. It 
was a Protestantism with all the rigidity of the Scots 
Protestantism, but without its democratic sympathies— 
a Protestantism of the petit bourgeois. It was impressed 
upon my youth that religion w r as a matter of wearing 
black clothes, playing no games, and reading only “Sun¬ 
day” books on Sunday; of reading two “portions” of the 
Bible of the appointed length on week-days; of attending 
family prayers, which, one felt instinctively, was princi¬ 
pally for the benefit of the servants, w T ho sat on three 
chairs in an exact row in the middle of the room. (It was 
for myself a severe Physical Exercise, and consisted of 
kneeling very straight up in front of a chair which 
I was not allowed to touch under pain of continual smacks 
from my mother. This was only relieved by the ever¬ 
present hope that something would go wrong, that my 
father would read the same prayers twice over or omit 
some essential part of the routine, which, indeed, often 
occurred, and was the signal for subdued giggling round 
the room.) 

One can laugh now over much that one then cried 
about; but family anecdotes are not here in place; per¬ 
haps Samuel Butler’s The Way of all Flesh would give 
the best impression of the religious environment of my 
boyhood. And this religion did play a very considerable 
part in my life, and I took it as much a matter of course 
as being washed and dressed. I can only state as a fact 



GREATS 


41 


that when I was first sent to school at the age of eight I 
knew an immense quantity of the Bible by heart, a know¬ 
ledge which was useful in gaining me all the Divinity 
Prizes for which I ever competed. I had no inkling that 
my environment was in any way peculiar before I went 
to school; I had scarcely any playmate except my 
younger sister, and later, my brother. Did I reflect upon 
it at all? It is hard to say. 

I will relate only two incidents, one told against me 
by my mother, the other which I remember very keenly 
as happening not later than my fifth year. My mother 
tells how, when three years old, after much admonition 
for some naughtiness or other I replied, “Though dark 
my path and sad my lot, I will be still and murmur not.” 
She adds that she has no idea where I could have heard the 
words. The other is the emotional recollection associated 
with a punishment by a particular nurserymaid. I had 
had read to me the Sermon on the Mount. I had a partic¬ 
ular affection for bacon fat, which was always a subject 
of dispute between my sister and me at breakfast. Ergo, 
thought I, I must give up my portion of bacon fat to her 
next day. The nurserymaid w r as unsympathetic, and my 
venture in unselfishness was treated as defiance of the 
powers that be. On the ground of other specific recol¬ 
lections I can say certainly that I was perplexed, first, 
how to square the treatment of the servants with my 
knowledge of the Bible—I think I always felt a certain 
sympathy with them, as also in the power of these other 
two beings who were on such intimate terms with God that 
they alone knew what He would punish and what He 
would reward—and, second, as to the wickedness of men¬ 
tioning sexual matters. Until I went to school I was sub¬ 
ject to no strong influence other than that of my parents 



42 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


(whom up to this date I hardly differentiated) and my 
uncles and aunts, of whom later. 

My impression is that in the first stage “God” meant 
to me absolutely nothing but the power of my parents. 
I think it would not otherwise have been so easy to obliter¬ 
ate him on first going to school. I at once lost my sense 
of obligation to perform those prayers and Bible read¬ 
ings, and very soon I gave up the performance of them 
too. I do not connect the school chapel services with the 
slightest degree of religious sentiment. I had violent 
fluctuations of happiness and unhappiness, but did not 
connect them with religion in any way. When, at the 
age of ten, a serious-minded tutor tried to convert me, 
I laughed him into giving up the attempt. All that was 
silly; a sign of weakness. My ideal at that time, I re¬ 
member, was the “wily Odysseus”; I made up my mind to 
accomplish in the school through diplomacy what seemed 
through lack of athletic prowess impossible. To some 
extent I succeeded. I thought: “One day I shall be able 
to manage my father too.” 

In this temper of cynical Positivism I was probably 
a very unamiable person when, at thirteen, I left my priv¬ 
ate school for one of the big public schools. I was de¬ 
servedly, if somewhat severely, repressed in my first two 
years there, and distaste for my home grew with my un¬ 
happiness at school. I could no longer play with my 
sister, and I had found no other interests there. I was 
rather forcibly driven in upon myself. My antipathy 
to my parents grew and grew during these two years, till 
it assumed the proportions of a black cloud over my life, 
and was invested with the characteristics of all the tvrants 
and monsters who were ready to hand in the history les¬ 
sons, and particularly in the Greek history. I remember a 


GREATS 


43 


letter to my father at about my fourteenth year in which 
I held ardently in the spirit of Herodotus or Sophocles on 
the necessity of obeying my tutor as officer of the school 
to which I belonged, and the necessity of disobeying him 
as mere instrument of autocratic parents. I attributed 
every misfortune which befell me at school to the secret 
machinations of my parents with the authorities. The 
God of my childhood had gradually become my Devil. 

At this stage the conflict had certainly no strictly 
religious significance. From the religious point of view, 
perhaps, the only event of note was the growing influence 
in my fourteenth and fifteenth years of a somewhat older 
boy, who introduced me to the mysteries of Anglo-Catho- 
licism. He was a personality likely to attract; diversely 
brilliant, subtle, humorous, combining with these intellect¬ 
ual gifts a sympathy which later degenerated into soft¬ 
ness. His influence was very transitory, but I learned 
from him two things which were not so unconnected as 
they appear. First he really reawoke my belief in the 
possibility of a real personal religion, which, in spite of 
its elaborate appeal to my intellectual snobbishness, was 
far more real and vital than anything I had experienced 
before. From that moment religion became a factor in 
my life, curious as were the phases that it underwent. 
Second, he taught me to admire Swinburne. 

Curiously enough, I soon after came up against real 
religion in the other camp, through a visit to an extremely 
pious Protestant lady who tried to persuade me, by means 
of the book of Revelation and an equation of the Beast 
with the Roman Catholic Church, that the world would 
come to an end in 1915. I was really upset by this point 
of view, and prayed continually for a miracle to decide 
which of the two extremes was favoured by God. But 


44 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


this Protestantism had no chance, with its superficial rela¬ 
tionship to the religion of my home. I stealthily read 
Catholic books, and gloried in the possession of a God 
in whom my parents had no part nor lot. I was im¬ 
mensely happier now. Under the spell of it I was con¬ 
firmed. 

This development lasted, if I remember rightly, about 
eighteen months. Together with concurrent “good for¬ 
tune”? of various sorts it had an effect on my life. I 
found in the Communion Service more than I had believed 
possible. In the end it broke inevitably on the one hidden 
rock of insincerity. I had the first open outburst of vio¬ 
lence against my parents shortly before my confirmation, 
in which I let off the suppressed emotions of years. I 
was repressed after that more than ever, and humiliated 
before my greatest friends; in return I comforted myself 
with the Imprecatory Psalms. 

About eighteen months after my confirmation matters 
came to a crisis in this direction. From seventeen till 
twenty-two I was occupied above all things in a long and 
bitter struggle against my parents. . . . Starting with a 
quarrel about money, it involved eventually my sister and 
brother, most of my relatives, and most of my teachers. 
There were periods of superficial calm, but I think the 
feeling of tension and the desire to avoid each other was 
at no time absent during that period, and the fact of the 
struggle had a very great effect on my internal develop¬ 
ment. 

I feel still that there was something elemental and 
necessary about the struggle. It was a fight for a bare 
minimum of freedom, which had to come sooner or later, 
but it was embittered by the religious problems involved. 
It was easy enough to form the idea that my father was 


GREATS 


45 


acting dishonestly; easy also to believe that he was ill- 
treating my sister and trying to separate her from me. 
To all such reproaches my father had one method of reply 
—a deluge of lectures, sermons, pamphlets, threatening 
the wrath of God upon anyone who ventured to question 
anything that their parents said or did. This was accom¬ 
panied by more practical threats through the medium of 
my house master, and eventually the head master. I got 
from them much real but timid sympathy, as I thought it; 
I got from another official of the school not only the 
degree of independence which I needed to avoid my home 
in the holidays, and to avoid having to ask for pocket 
money, but also a lasting friendship which had a great 
effect upon my life. 

But at first I had no such older friend to lean upon. I 
played eagerly my father’s own game; I countered his 
texts with other texts; I felt a certain Schadenfreude in 
this diplomatic game of trying to put the other party in 
the wrong. Only it was no game then, but terrible earnest; 
I felt myself a Crusader, not only for my freedom, 
but for my God, for the protection of the Oppressed 
(my younger brother and sisters), for Liberty of 
Belief. Perhaps I lived again the history of my people 
of East Anglia. I did believe passionately in a 
God who was compatible with reason and liberty of 
thought, and when I expressed these sentiments, I was 
told that I must be kept from contaminating my family 
with such dangerous ideas. I was denounced on all 
occasions as an Atheist and Socialist. I had then 
no notion of the economic significance of Socialism; I 
was under the influence of Bernard Shaw and William 
Morris, but still more of Tolstoy. As a prefect and as a 
cadet officer I tried to put my Tolstoyian principles into 


46 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


effect, with rather mixed success. As is usual with youth, 
I painted everything in vivid whites and blacks. As secre¬ 
tary of a debating club I undertook a campaign against 
corrupt elections. I refused to make use of my privilege 
of “fagging” the smaller boys. I practised asceticisms, 
such as having no fire in my room for a whole winter, or 
sitting up and meditating all night. But perhaps that 
belongs to a later stage. 

I said to myself one day, “What if I am an Atheist? 
What if my father represents, not a misstatement of 
Christianity, but Christianity in itself and in its essence? 
All the tyrants and obscurantists since the world began 
have based their claims on Divine Right, on a Divine Reve¬ 
lation where there is no room for reason. All the religious 
wars which have devastated the earth have sprung from 
this essence of Christianity as a Revealed Religion. It 
can have no place in a world of democracy and enlighten¬ 
ment.” 

My hero was no longer Tolstoy; Shelley and Swinburne 
inspired my hopeful moods, and Marcus Aurelius and the 
Buddha my depressions. The last I owed to a very gifted 
boy whom I knew at that time, for me one of the great 
losses of the war. I threw myself into my new mission, 
which was nothing less than the destruction of Chris¬ 
tianity. 

I called myself a Pantheist, and the sense of the unseen 
remained strong with me. But I never missed an oppor¬ 
tunity of diverting an essay or a speech into a polemic 
against Christianity. I devoted much ingenuity to mak¬ 
ing out St. Paul to be a Pantheist; I spent hours of argu¬ 
ment upon the head master; with the greatest difficulty I 
obtained permission to recite Swinburne’s “Hymn to 
Man” to the assembled school; and finally I deluged my 


GREATS 


47 


father with blasphemies, spoken, written, and printed. 
Perhaps this was the motive of the whole; I think it does 
not explain everything. 

Out of the many personalities who left their mark 
upon my school life, of whom I make no mention, I must 
except the new head master, who came on the scene during 
my last terms. He was a man whom I admired at once 
for his intellect, and came gradually to love for the 
greatness of soul concealed under a somewhat capricious 
humour. He was the first person who was neither shocked 
nor contemptuous over my anti-Christian crusade; he 
made me feel that he was personally sorry, and that I was 
missing the greatest thing in the world. He infected me 
with his own enthusiasm for his own heroes, St. Paul, St. 
Francis, Amos, Browning. He was a hero-worshipper. 
He also had in a very high degree the sense of God in 
nature and in history which had always been with me to 
some extent, only, on account of his personal Christianity, 
it was in him a living, moving force. He gave me the 
impulse to worship; he convinced me that for a keen and 
candid mind Christianity was compatible with liberty. He 
is not understood, perhaps through his own fault; he pro¬ 
duced a very unfavourable impression upon F. B. He did 
not make Christianity practical in my life, but he was a 
very great inspiration for the coming years. 

My years in the army, from the religious point of 
view, were blank and meagre. My longed-for financial 
independence improved my relationship with my parents 
for a few months, until a much more serious cause of 
trouble arose. I conceived that they were trying by base¬ 
less slanders to cut me off from all my friends and to 
bring me into trouble with my regimental authorities. I 
did what I knew would most hurt my mother’s affection 


48 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


and my father’s pride; I refused to see them before being 
sent to France. 

The reply was a storm of denunciatory tracts, which 
followed me everywhere around France and Germany, let¬ 
ters rejoicing at the judgment of God when I failed in an 
examination, letters announcing my father’s determina¬ 
tion to prevent me getting a job or going to the Uni¬ 
versity until I proved more tractable and apologised for 
my conduct. The atmosphere of a fashionable regiment 
was not favourable. I hardened and embittered my heart, 
and set myself to win a materially full life, if the stars 
in their courses fought against me. 

In this spirit I went to Oxford, almost without money 
or hope of having enough to live upon. And yet my be¬ 
lief in God was never quite dead. Three things kept it 
alive—a change of station to the Yorkshire moors, my 
first taste of the hills, with all that that means; a couple 
of months lived among some very unfortunate people, 
which made me conscious of my longing and of my ineffec¬ 
tiveness to help; and, most of all, an act of absolutely 
unexpected Christian generosity, which enabled me to 
live at Oxford and reawoke my sense of the undeserved 
goodness of God to me. For the second time in my life 
He saved me through the intervention of an absolute 
stranger from a belief that selfish materialism is the only 
active force among mankind. 

My University years were years of rebuilding. The 
systematic study of philosophy and of remote history, 
into which I plunged passionately, had an overwhelming 
effect. It took the edge off my harsh dogmatisms. I at¬ 
tacked Christianity, as before, at every opportunity in 
debate and private argument, but in a different spirit. I 
began to wish it might be true. I preached Socialism as 



GREATS 


49 


the truth of Christianity. I could not help being im¬ 
pressed by the college chaplain and by the “Religion and 
Life” group in Oxford, who seemed to have a real religion 
which was compatible with freedom and honesty of 
thought. But above all I was impressed by two under¬ 
graduate friends, temperamentally very different from 
each other and from myself, in no way remarkable in the 
college except as being real Christians. 

One of them, M., was a man considerably older than 
myself, who, after a career in the Civil Service, had de¬ 
cided to give up his prospects there and become ordained 
in the English Church. He had no particular intellect, 
and I own with shame to having felt sometimes embar¬ 
rassed by his company, but he had a great heart. He 
used to treat me like a father, sharing all my depressions 
and irritations. He used to flatter my vanity by asking 
my opinion “as a philosopher” upon theological ques¬ 
tions ; and when I railed against the Church he would 
answer me as far as he could and when he could not, then 
he would beam all over and say softly to himself, “Dear 
creature!” I came to know gradually of his influence in 
other quarters of the college; he felt a mission to “heal 
those who are broken in heart.” He had a mystical and 
contemplative temperament, which was quite compatible 
with a taste for giving riotous dinner-parties. 

My other friend, J., was peculiarly unlike him in 
most respects. A person of abundant energy, he used 
to butt about the world, breaking his head against all 
the walls of unreason and unrighteousness he could find. 
He was absolutely fearless, and participated in every mad 
rag which undergraduate ingenuity could devise. He 
used to campaign furiously against every abuse in the col¬ 
lege and in favour of all the “depressed classes” of the 


50 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


University—the workmen of Ruskin College, the scouts, 
the women, and the Indians. He had little theoretical but 
much practical interest in discussion; he had a pathetic 
belief in the possibility of convincing people by reason, 
and used to spend his time bringing incompatible people 
together at meals for their mutual education. He had 
a great gift of winning the confidence of absolute 
strangers, such as Japs and peasant women. He was 
absolutely irrepressible and indepressible. 

I had the privilege of travelling with him a good deal 
in the country. I learned there what the keeping in 
touch with God through prayer meant to him. I envied 
him his strength and I envied his absolute thoughtlessness 
for himself. Many were our discussions, lasting far into 
the night, round a fire, curled up in the arm-chairs which 
only Oxford understands, or lying in a canoe under the 
moonlight and the willows of the Hinksey stream. 

We would talk with that sense of leisure and delight in 
pure argument for its own sake that one only has during 
one’s first year at the University, when one has not yet 
learned to shrink before the great unsolved questions of 
the world. We were both reading philosophy. I was 
thoroughly under the spell of Hegel (not the subjective 
nihilists who claim to be his followers in England, but the 
master himself) and of Plato, whom I rediscovered 
through the great German idealists. I think I clung to 
this belief in the progress of Reason through the world, 
not because I could see her traces, but just because I 
could not see them. Where others went easily by instinct, 
I felt I had to beat out a way painfully through the jungle 
of things. My earth was so formless and void it must 
conceal somewhere the form-giving Spirit. Life could not 
be just this that I experienced. I could not rid myself 


GREATS 


51 


of the persuasion that St. Paul formulated, but which is 
the essence of the teaching of all the great philosophers 
in Greece and in Germany: “We know that all things 
work together for good.” “The world-history is the 
purpose of God, which all in all is being fulfilled.” 

I had also a kind of mystical belief that the great 
saints and prophets on the earth had understood this 
purposiveness of the world’s history and been satisfied. I 
thought with Augustine of “that moment of Understand¬ 
ing which we longed for, which were the fulfilment of that 
promise, ‘Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.’ ” I had 
a curious experience about a year before meeting F. B. 
My friend M., mentioned above, tried to persuade me to 
come over with him one day to the theological college in 
the country where he intended to go on leaving Oxford. 
I said it would amuse me to see this new sort of Zoo, 
where all the prospective clerics were gathered together; 
I never missed a chance of jeering at M.’s future profes¬ 
sion. The impression I got from my visit was not at all 
what I expected. I could not evade the feeling that these 
otherwise commonplace people had a secret resource 
somewhere, a certain security about their life which it 
was a joy to feel. I attributed the feeling rather un¬ 
successfully to the beauty of the place and the easy sim¬ 
plicity of their life; I knew that I had felt the breath of 
the Spirit of God. And I said, “How is it that the Chris¬ 
tians have preserved something divine and living, in spite 
of their allegiance to a dead revelation and an obscurant¬ 
ist organisation—in spite of their immoral belief that a 
forgiveness of sins and benefits after death can be ob¬ 
tained through the recitation of some ill-understood for¬ 
mulae—in spite of their barbarous myth that God, to 
appease His own anger, demanded the sacrifice of an 



52 


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innocent person?” And I set to work furiously on com¬ 
parative religion and mythology, on Frazer, and Reinach, 
and Rohde, to prove to others and satisfy myself that all 
these Christian dogmas and rituals were old before Jesus 
appeared on the stage; that other religions had produced 
as high a morality and as high a culture; that the Chris¬ 
tians could not claim a monopoly of the Divine Spirit, 
which had spoken from the poets and prophets and 
philosophers of every age. 

One Saturday night I was writing an essay upon the 
idea of the soul, which I had been trying to trace through 
the early stages of European culture, when J. burst into 
my room, very excited. “Hello,” he cried. “I’ve got 
a brand new phenomenon for you.” He proceeded to tell 
me about F. B. 

“But what does he do?” I asked. 

“Oh, he just goes around waking up the individual.” 

“Well, I don’t want to see him then; I don’t want to 
be vaguely enthused; there’s too much of that about the 
world already.” 

“But he’s a regular prophet; he believes actively in 
the Spirit.” 

“Well, I don’t believe he is a Christian then,” I said; 
“the Christians have long put the Spirit away on the 
shelf; they bring Him out once a year on Whit-Sunday, 
and then forget about Him again.” 

He looked at his watch. “Well, this is Whit-Sunday,” 
he said. . . . 

Later in the day I made my first acquaintance with 
F. B. “A horrid, bumptious American,” was my inward 
comment when he came into my room, with an introduc¬ 
tion from J. I had severe toothache at the time, and was 
having a nerve slowly killed, and was feeling very dis- 


GREATS 


53 

agreeable. I asked him about his travels. He told me 
some of his “yarns.” The general theme was that “crows 
are black the whole world over.” 

“But I don’t feel conscious of any particular sin,” 
I said. “I have heard this stuff from my youth, and it 
all seems so irrelevant. I wish I were capable of com¬ 
mitting some really great sin. It’s just lack of oppor¬ 
tunity, or, still more, lack of imagination. Your ‘inter¬ 
esting sinners’ had to be born interesting. I dream and 
criticise and never get anywhere definite. If only one 
knew what one had to do. . . .” And perhaps my atten¬ 
tion turned upon my own inner soreness, and I forgot that 
two minutes ago I had been trying to decide how to get 
rid of the man. I forgot the unpleasantness of his voice; 
in fact, he hardly seemed to be there; he seemed to feel 
my dissatisfaction with things too well; he was no longer 
a second focus of consciousness, but was somehow shar¬ 
ing in mine. 

“You are disorganised,” he said, “without a centre— 
without Christ.” 

Another man came in on a casual errand. It was like 
the switching on of the lights in a cinema. One’s mind 
is not adapted for working on two levels at once. The 
silent figure in the corner had somehow set it going on 
the lowest level; the superficial didn’t come easily. My 
visitor saw, I think, my embarrassment, and soon 
left. 

F. B. began to ask me about my life. I felt somehow 
that I was on my trial, though not that this American 
was in any way concerned in it. I answered coolly and 
clearly. 

“Well, I’m pleased to have met you, Mr.-,” he said, 

getting up. . . . 



54 


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Something overwhelming came over me. It was an 
insult to play with this man. . . . 

. . . “And I also Zic,” I continued in my narrative. 
“That is, usually. For instance, what I told you five min¬ 
utes ago . . .” 

I felt somewhat paralysed, as do probably all irreso¬ 
lute people after having let loose the irrevocable, but pro¬ 
foundly happy. 

“God told me,” he said. 

He told me about his listening to God and of the Bible 
as the mouthpiece of the living Spirit; of the guidance of 
Jesus Christ here and now in the everyday decisions of 
life. A riot of new possibilities began to break into the 
dimness of my mental outlook. I prayed rather definitely. 

I walked to the gate with him; I was feeling elated as 
never before. “I seem to have lost control of myself to¬ 
night,” I said; “how absurd all this will seem to-morrow!” 

“You’ve heard about the seven devils,” he said. “Get 
going at once.” 

I walked by the river with another in the early morn¬ 
ing, and it was as when the morning stars sang together, 
but after breakfast the whole events of the night before 
seemed hardly credible. “He is a psycho-analyst,” I said, 
“although I didn’t notice any of their tricks. We’ll see if 
his stunt with the Bible works.” 

I hunted out a Bible and turned up by chance the 
story of the paralytic man. “What does all the business 
about the forgiveness of sins mean? Which is easier to 
say . . .? ‘But that ye may know that the Son of Man 
hath power to forgive sins.’ . . . What about my tooth¬ 
ache last night!” 

I have dwelt on this first meeting rather because of 


GREATS 


55 


its immediate strangeness than because of its results. 
For the first time in my life I had deliberately and gladly 
made a fool of myself before a perfect stranger. I had 
told him things I had never breathed to another; I had 
told him of all my laughable vanities and dishonesties that 
make the stuff of a man’s most intimate life. I put it all 
down to some uncanny personal quality of the man, 
some quasi-hypnotic influence. (I believe now that re¬ 
ligion has nothing to fear in psychological explanations 
of the working of God, though these do not carry one 
very far.) I can only say that I was fairly on my guard 
against such influences, after what I had heard from J.; 
and I must emphatically deny, in view of what is said in 
some quarters against F. B., that I was in any particular 
trouble at the time. 

“Psychological or not, is this experience the voice of 
God?” That was for me the question. I answered, hesi¬ 
tantly but decidedly, “No!” Any half-savage thau¬ 
maturge playing skilfully on the chords of the mind could 
awaken such a momentary emotion. And my prejudice 
against Christianity in general, and against the religion 
of the Protestant sects in particular, rose up like a mist. 

I saw F. B. no more, but had an invitation from him 
some days afterwards to attend his “house-party” at 
Cambridge on August 6th. I was pleased to have a really 
good excuse for not going—two successive invitations in 
the South of England which would make a return to 
Cambridge impossible. But about August 3rd I received 
three letters, two saying that owing to unexpected illness 
my invitations had fallen through, one from F. B. say¬ 
ing that he was expecting me at Cambridge. I was very 
annoyed with the presumption of the man; I wrote and 
told him so. But my curiosity was too strong; I went. 


56 


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I will confine myself to the subjective impressions I 
received at that “house-party.” Eirst, one must take 
into account the natural attractiveness of even a Cam¬ 
bridge college in the summer. Second, I was surprised 
by the personnel. They were a very mixed lot, with 
perhaps a preponderance of the “Rugger Blue” type of 
undergraduate, but they were very natural, and seemed 
to have left the clique spirit behind. There were there 
three other Americans apart from E. B., and they mixed 
up with the rest very creditably. The soul of the party, 
E. B. himself, was very unobtrusive. He refused to pre¬ 
side at any of the meetings, but one knew without looking 
for him whether he was there or not. One admired his 
seeming carelessness about the success of his show. It 
was a bold idea bringing two distinguished speakers on 
the first night, but it broke down our first shyness. One 
felt already that the “walls were shaking.” 

Only all that that phrase implies was at that time new 
to me. There was hardly a trace of the hard religious 
dogmatism which I had gone there to find; but in so far 
as there was, I could not feel it. I was absorbed in a 
new experience. I felt as if I was living upon a mountain- 
top right up against the sky, with the other peaks near 
and naked against the sun—peaks which it would take 
hours to reach along the devious, man-made tracks across 
the valley. And there was nothing left but the claims 
of God and of the other man standing there before God. 
And I saw that it was the sins of our choosing, the fear 
and shame, with which we tie ourselves about, which pre¬ 
vent us from living always thus simply and nobly. I 
saw also that it was all these things which debar us from 
a living faith in God; that one can only trust a person 
from whom one has nothing to conceal; that only this 


GREATS 


57 


faith in the tireless working of God in our lives could let 
loose our buried energies, could bring us to take risks 
with our wealth and reputation. “Sin blinds, sin binds”; 
it could hardly be put better than in this catchword of 
F. B.’s—Christianity not as imprisonment, but as a 
Liberation of the soul! 

This is all too vague and subjective, and yet I must 
emphasise one point. I do not remember the substance 
of F. B.’s speeches; it was not that which counted. I 
could and did in the group-discussion argue quite coldly 
against some of the points which he or his supporters 
seemed to over-emphasise. It was a particular individual 
experience which I have had but few times in my life, and 
perhaps never with the same intensity—the experience I 
have described above as “standing before God.” What¬ 
ever I may subsequently think of F. B. cannot alter my 
conviction on this subject. 

I walked up and down the Quad much of one night, 
pleading against the hardness of the tasks that were set 
me to do. I had to tackle my parents; I had to tackle a 
man I had known and feared at school, the last person in 
the world I would have chosen to talk to upon this sort 
of subject; I had to put myself to shame before certain 
members of the party. I had, beside the practical ques¬ 
tions, the whole theory of this new Weltanschauung to 
tackle. And I said, “This time I am sure it is God’s 
doing, and that He won’t let me down.” 

It was nearly a year before I saw F. B. again, a year 
of hopes and disappointments. I had immediately to face 
my home and family; I had to face some earnest Cam¬ 
bridge undergraduates who were conducting a missionary 
campaign in my little town, and who nearly drove me into 
the wilds of revolt again. I have found it hard to believe 


58 


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that the denunciation of one’s fellow-Christians is not 
of the essence of Christianity; so much energy and en¬ 
thusiasm are spent upon it. It is hard for us human 
beings, to whom accidents of personality count so much, 
to remember that it is neither Paul nor Apollos that mat¬ 
ters, “but God that giveth the increase.” I heard many 
months afterwards that even this personal clash brought 
its harvest. Perhaps it is only through such clashes that 
we learn slowly and painfully to separate the essence of 
the teaching of Christ from the purely individual elements 
in the personality of the teacher. Personality, the 
medium of all religion, is by no means an unequivocal con¬ 
ception. It is a recurrent charge against F. B. that 
“his disciples” are excessively dependent on him, take 
their experience from him at second hand. In most re¬ 
spects, however, we can only picture our relation to 
Christ through the personal relationships that we have 
experienced ourselves. Such experience should warn us 
not to expect to go too fast. When anyone has lived 
many years in mutual distrust of his fellows it is the 
work of a few hours,—maybe a single act of faith, of 
willingness to humiliate himself—and the other comes out 
to meet him, comes further than he had dreamed; but it 
is the work of months, maybe of years, in spite of the best 
will in the world on both sides, to wipe away all the 
effects. There is much to unlearn. 

Those of us who were at Cambridge, and had felt there 
something new come into our lives, formed a little circle 
at Oxford with the object of keeping that spirit alive by 
maintaining touch with each other. Perhaps we were 
all somewhat discouraged by the meagreness of immediate 
result. We had to contend with the damp warmth of the 
Oxford atmosphere, spritual as well as physical, which 



GREATS 


59 


is the enemy of heroic resolutions. I had to contend with 
the comparatively hard and monotonous work of the 
last year before “schools” (the final examination), and 
with the excuse it afforded for “minding one’s own busi¬ 
ness” unduly. I had shrunk before the thought of this 
year before “schools,” with all my friends “gone down”; 
it was better than I could have imagined. This faith 
which I had caught a glimpse of opened both my eyes and 
my mouth. I began to learn that I was not the only un¬ 
fortunate in the world. I slowly began to think of doing 
something for the people with whom I was brought in 
contact, instead of thinking only of getting something 
out of them. By looking on them as opportunities, in this 
way I began gradually to lose my fear of strangers, a 
fear which I had come to regard as inevitable. But also 
I discovered things that had been happening around me 
for two years without my having any notion of their 
existence. I began to see a little of the picture that St. 
Paul describes as the “whole creation travailing in pain,” 
and to feel my helplessness before this fundamental fact 
of the world. The many people whom I came across “by 
chance,” by following the indications of God’s guidance, 
which were sometimes unquestionable, people who were for 
one reason or another almost losing hope, to whom I had 
to try to impart something of the faith I had caught 
sight of—this was sometimes the only thing in the world 
that kept up my own faith. This may read like Pragma¬ 
tism ; it appeared to me rather as the continual confirma¬ 
tion of a belief which I would gladly have disbelieved. I 
felt myself again and again before the question, “Am I 
willing to make a fool of myself for the sake of another?” 
Or, rather, I felt it not as a question, but as an order, in 
circumstances where I could see no reason for it; on the 


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occasions when I obeyed it, timidly and half-heartedly, I 
never found the command unnecessary. 

Also during this time I began to beat out a working 
theory to fit my experience. This came about probably 
through an old acquaintance but new friend among the 
undergraduates of my college. I had long admired his 
knowledge, but looked down upon his rather naive enthu¬ 
siasms. I had thought him rather “bourgeois”—a snob¬ 
bish term for something that is peculiarly uncongenial 
to the bulk of those who have suffered from a public school 
education. I discovered gradually the goodness of his 
heart. I do not mean in this connection that I took over 
his theories. He belonged to the respectable High Church 
of the seventeenth century and the older Tractarians; but 
he believed sincerely and actively in his Church, and was 
at all times ready to defend it. He had an immense and 
varied acquaintance, who laughed at him and loved him. 
In the course of discussion with him my ideas began to 
shape themselves. He formed one of a small group who 
met to discuss the Philosophy of Religion. Its regular 
membership consisted of a Roman Catholic, a Jew, a 
young Modernist theologian, two mild Agnostics, a very 
naive American Atheist, and a pious, rather narrow Non¬ 
conformist. But the lines were already laid for me. On 
my return from Cambridge in the summer my father asked 
me to read and criticise one of the books of essays which 
are the product of the very remarkable group of liberal 
Christians in Oxford who are associated with the name 
of Canon Streeter. I did find in the works of this group 
a theory of Christianity which was compatible with free¬ 
dom and progress of thought, and with the demands of 
practical experience. 

From the theoretical standpoint I had always had 


GREATS 


61 


two fundamental convictions upon the nature of the 
world. I was on the one hand attracted by the newer 
Evolutionism of Bergson and his disciples. From this 
source, but perhaps more from my anthropological read¬ 
ing, I thought of the world as an endless flux, in which no 
beliefs, scientific, moral, or religious, could survive more 
than a few hundred years. Such a view has a special 
attraction for our generation, the generation which has 
grown up in the war period and seen “the old faiths ruin 
and rend.” Positivism has never had such a slump in 
the intellectual world as at the present time. At the 
same time I could not help believing that this development 
had a Meaning, a Value, which was somehow related to 
our values; I could not banish from my mind the great 
assertion of the Idealistic tradition that “all we have 
thought or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist . . . 
when eternity reaffirms the conception of an hour.” But 
how to imagine the conjuncture of these two postulates 
of experience, how to picture a world in which all our 
beliefs are transitory and in which w r e yet can know that 
all our beliefs are transitory! 

The notion of a self-revealing God, a God who, out of 
blindly reacting animals, is creating Personal Souls in 
his own image; of this world of pleasure and sin as an 
Education, in the sense of Stevenson’s prayer; of the 
revelation of this “mystery” through the incarnation of 
Christ, the “Logos”—all this was new and wonderful to 
me, and supplied a theoretical want no less than a practi¬ 
cal. My mind leaped back to the later Epistles of St. 
Paul, where he develops this idea of “God in Christ re¬ 
conciling the world to Himself,” of Christ as the head of 
a body of creatures grown conscious of their Creator. 
This again connected itself with a host of mystical specu- 


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lations which are the common property of our age—an 
age awaking to the importance of the Unconscious and 
to the multiplicities of Personality. I have found them 
recently set forth by a German novelist, Gustav Meyrin, 
in his book The White Dominican. I only wish to empha¬ 
sise the fact that from the orthodox Christian point of 
view my theory was at that time, to say the least of it, 
deficient. The view of the Atonement to an angry God 
through a vicarious sacrifice, the view that treats the 
words of Christ as a Law and God as a policeman, was 
abhorrent to me. I was also not prepared to admit that 
the sin of individuals could disorder the plan of the uni¬ 
verse. I felt that this latter was in conflict with all the 
postulates of theoretical activity, just as the former doc¬ 
trines struck at the root of all practical activit}^. In re¬ 
gard to the reality of sin, I would only go as far as 
Cleanthes’ prayer: “0 God, let me follow out Thy will 
gladly; for if through evil desire I struggle against it 
to my own sorrow, yet must I follow it none the less.” Sin 
harms the individual soul of the sinner; it cannot harm 
God, nor, if this seem paradox, can it harm other souls. 
Perhaps it was the inherited Calvinism of my fathers com¬ 
ing to the surface. Calvinism can be a very unattrac¬ 
tive doctrine, but the notion of the overruling power of 
God to which it holds fast is of the essence of all religion 
whatever. It was the overwhelming belief in the power 
of God here and now that inflamed the saints and prophets 
and heroes from the beginning of time. Was it possible 
to have a faith which could be progressive and liberal, 
and yet possess the power to move mountains ? I believed 
then that it was. Perhaps the existence of such a prophet 
in a prominent position in Oxford was the only ground I 
had then for such a belief. My greatest debt during this 



GREATS 


63 


time is owed to Dr. Selbie, although he was then unknown 
to me personally. His was the voice of one who, like 
Plato’s philosopher-king, had climbed to the heights, 
without losing his bearings when he returned to the val¬ 
leys. He was so unlike F. B. in every way, and like him 
in one respect—his religion was alive. 

Thus, though not unconscious of my theoretical differ¬ 
ences from F. B., it was this unmistakable living quality 
in his religion that made me await his return with eager 
expectation. Here was a man who could stir even Oxford. 
He did. How I am at a loss to explain. He sat for two 
weeks in a room in one of the colleges, and by the end of 
his stay the college was ranged sharply apart in two 
camps—the pro- and anti-F.B.’s. He addressed a meet¬ 
ing in the college soon after his arrival, at which an in¬ 
fluential section of the undergraduates came with a con¬ 
certed scheme to “rag” this impudent American. And 
somehow they felt their witticisms out of place, and the 
attack fell rather flat. Perhaps it was just the quiet 
confidence of the man that his enemies could not help feel¬ 
ing. Or one may repeat a second-hand story of how he 
led a petulant committee up to the top of Shotover Hill 
and harangued them upon their sins, with the effect that 
they one and all tried to resign. His whole stay in Ox¬ 
ford was an incredible tour de force. Was it more than 
that ? 

That, in the nature of the case, can never be answered 
by a human observer. I believe he brought help and 
“Good News” to many. I think I was somewhat disap¬ 
pointed with the immediate results in the “test-cases” I 
had mentally set him. You cannot write answers on a 
human personality as on a piece of foolscap. And I 
found it a little hard to answer the charge that much of 


64 


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his following was obtained by the questionable method 
of making lurid confessions of sins in meetings. “Can 
this gospel be of God, if it be spread by playing upon 
the fears of the nervous and inexperienced?” This was 
the question that many people whom I respected put to 
me at that time. I had doubts like the rest, but I had 
opportunities of knowing him more intimately than the 
rest. My mockery faded away into self-reproach at the 
first contact with his simple goodness. My natural em¬ 
barrassment at being mixed up with this crank preacher 
at all was a spur to me to defend him more vigorously. I 
attributed all my doubts to the misrepresentations of his 
disciples. 

His disciples? Perhaps therein lay the false concep¬ 
tion that was the cause of my difficulties. It is easy to 
feel the emotion behind the great hymn of St. Prancis, 
difficult to live it out in everyday life: “Let the Lord God 
be praised in all His creatures.” 

Is it possible in the last resort to distinguish Chris¬ 
tianity from the opinions and prejudices of all other 
Christians whatever, without one’s own belief becoming 
thereby thin and ineffective? My belief in Christ began 
to detach itself gradually from my belief in F. B. A few 
days’ stay with my friend in his theological college men¬ 
tioned above brought to my consciousness the fact that 
this Christianity had gnawed its way into my life. One 
morning in a wood on top of the Chilterns I felt irresisti¬ 
bly that Christ was calling me to some definite work. 
What it might be I had no idea. I was afraid before this 
“amaranthine weed.” Also I knew the vagueness and 
ineffectiveness of my temperament, to which F. B. was 
like a cold bath. With all this in mind, I accepted an 
offer of his to travel round Europe with him in the sum- 


GREATS 


65 


mer as tutor to a friend of his. I said I should go un¬ 
reservedly under his orders, under a vow of “holy obedi¬ 
ence.” It should be the discipline that was the essence of 
“Continuance.” 

The second house-party was a foretaste of the con¬ 
tinental pilgrimage; indeed, I met there most of the per¬ 
sonnel of the “F. B. troupe”—as an observer once called 
it—for the first time. The atmosphere was not at all 
like that of the Cambridge party of the year before; the 
element of the professional Christian who has a pet doc¬ 
trine to expound was much more in evidence. The first 
two days were peculiarly inharmonious; criticism was in 
the air. I found much that was uncongenial to me in the 
views and manners of the “disciples,” but at the same 
time I discovered ever new qualities to admire in the 
“master.” He had hardly spoken in the first two days, 
but he knew what we were saying, and was quite unper¬ 
turbed by it. “Wait” I said to his detractors, “wait till 
he really takes things in hand.” 

The end of the house-party was the greatest personal 
triumph for F. B. that could have been imagined. The 
lion lay down with the lamb. It will have been adequately 
described elsewhere in this book. I went away, after 
lunching with a man I had once described as “the most 
unsympathetic I could imagine,” with the voice that Peter 
heard sounding in my ears: “What God hath cleansed, 
that call not thou common.” 

The “Continental tour,” which gave me the most ade¬ 
quate insight into the personality and work of F. B., is 
difficult for me to describe in any detail, because it in¬ 
volved rather intimately the affairs of others, which I 
do not feel justified in bringing into print. It was a very 
severe lesson in practical internationalism. The “troupe” 


66 


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were all Americans 1 —which, however, should not be taken 
as a sufficient description of them. We had one other 
Englishman with us, a former acquaintance of mine, who 
joined the party as it was leaving England under some¬ 
what peculiar circumstances. He was always there 
under protest, had considerable powers of observation, 
and used to turn the tap of his rather venomous humour 
continuously upon the Americans and their friends. I 
was always told off to look after him, and he was a great 
strain upon my loyalty to F. B. I was in a sense the 
cause of his joining the party. I had introduced him to 
F. B. because I believed he was in need of something that 
F. B. could give him. I cannot leave D. altogether out of 
the story, because he was in some sense one side of myself 
—the side that rebelled against the particular religious 
forms of the Americans. To explain what I mean I must 
introduce an idea which was very well expressed to me by a 
German friend: “You English,” he said, “are always at 
the mercy of your ‘.Esthetic Conscience. 5 You have an 
instinctive reaction against some forms of behaviour which 
seem out of place, vulgar, theatrical. This Esthetic Con¬ 
science is right ninety-nine times out of a hundred; in the 
hundredth case it will prevent you from helping or appre¬ 
ciating a man whose constitution or education are radi¬ 
cally different from your own. 55 My Esthetic Conscience 
had a hard time of it with the Americans. I was not ac¬ 
customed to the ways of the sort of international hotels 
where Americans visiting Europe stay; to travelling round 
chateaux at the rate of half-a-dozen a day, counting them 
up as if they were scalps; to the habit of trying to buy 
any pretty thing that one caught sight of in a private 
house or garden. My tutorial work never materialised. 

1 The host, I understand, was a very original and hearty Canadian, 
who not only paid the piper but set the tune. H. B. 


GREATS 


67 


If it had not been for D.—my departure would have left 
him in a peculiarly awkward position—I should have 
packed up and left the party. I felt myself in an alien 
culture, and it w r as quite clear that the other members of 
the party felt the same of me. I hardly saw F. B.; plans 
were made and changed over my head; I was physically 
tired with the perpetual travelling, and felt utterly in 
the dark. For the sake of D. I had to keep up my spirits 
and the honour of F. B. I spoke of the Diversity of 
Manners and the Identity of Principles. I was aware 
of the great complex of prejudices which I have called 
the “^Esthetic Conscience”—all too aware of it. I had 
lost confidence in my own values. I found myself in a 
state of utter bewilderment at the utter relativity of 
things. I said one day gravely enough to a German 
friend, who in a fit of absence of mind had poured sugar 
instead of salt on his egg: “I see it is the custom of your 
country to eat sugar with your eggs.” That was what 
I felt like with the Americans. A severe disappointment 
over “schools” a couple of weeks before had completed 
my discouragement. I felt I was inefficient according 
to the American hustling standards, and the knowledge 
made me more inefficient than ever. F. B. never missed 
an opportunity of pointing out the fact to me. I told 
him once that living with him involved running one’s head 
up against a stone wall whenever one tried to exercise 
any initiative of one’s own; the only possible course was 
to follow orders passively. He used to lecture me with 
perfect justice on my “obtuseness”; he did really increase 
my powers of observation. He was too infallible; I won¬ 
dered at the cleverness and the energy of the man; I be¬ 
gan to feel more and more alienated from him. 

And then a wonderful day came. We had just arrived 


68 


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in Brussels. The journeys always made me feel irritable. 
I had made up my mind to go at any price. Things were 
simplified for me. D. was so unusually rude to F. B. 
that it was decided that he would have to leave the party. 
I was “detailed” to take him on with me to my destina¬ 
tion in Germany. I had a weary day trying to make 
plans for D. I came to see F. B. in the evening to make 
final arrangements. He was in bed. I thanked him 
formally for all he had done and told him what I meant 
to do. . . . And he looked at me very much moved, and 
said: “Clive, I have one thing to say to you before you 
go. I have got to ask your pardon. I’ve left you in the 
dark and in the cold. I’m sorry.” ... I was over¬ 
whelmed; this from my superman? Anything but this. 
And he began to pour out all his hopes and anxieties, his 
plans and his disappointments. “No, no,” I said, “you 
don’t know, you don’t know how I have suspected you 
and slandered you. ... If I had only known . . .” 
My stone wall had become suddenly human. Become? 
My mind went racing backwards over our travels, and I 
saw that there W'as no change in him , but an opening of 
my eyes to a side of him that had got lost in the press of 
an American holiday. We talked long and came to the 
roots of things. And I came to recognise for the first 
time the place of the human Jesus in the Christian world- 
order. 

I saw F. B. later that night. It was about half-past 
twelve, and he looked very tired. He was going to talk 
with a man. I knew something about the business; it was 
a fight for an almost desperate soul. He told me some¬ 
thing about it, and asked me to pray for him. I saw 
from his face what it meant to him. I think I understood 
for the first time something of what it meant to Jesus 


GREATS 


69 


when the three disciples went to sleep in the garden. I 
prayed as never before to the Man of Sorrows, the Reve¬ 
lation of the loving pity of God. 

I did not leave next day. We parted fittingly one 
sunny morning among the Bavarian hills, our hearts full 
of the splendour of the greatest drama in the world whose 
power glows from the faces of the peasant-players and 
draws spectators from every quarter of the world, with¬ 
out distinction of race or sect. One is a little conscious 
of the mechanical triumph of the stage Crucifixion, but in 
spite of it there is something there that awakes all the 
dramatic instincts in players and spectators, because it 
appeals to the most primitive and vital human emotions 
—the spectacle of a divine man taking leave of His 
friends and going consciously and in full faith to His 
death. 

Since then I have had no occasion to change my mind 
on this fundamental point. I believe utterly in F. B.’s 
dictum, which indeed is not F. B.’s—'“Look after the 
Practice and the Theory will look after itself”; “If any 
man do My Will, he shall know of the Doctrine.” But I 
do not believe that the two can be permanently kept in 
water-tight compartments. I have had some interesting 
experience since then which has increased my distrust of 
religious short cuts. I do not regard as short cuts the 
essentials of F. B.’s practice—the practice of scrupulous 
self-discipline as a means of keeping in touch with God 
and getting into touch with men; I regard them as neces¬ 
sary preliminaries for finding the way at all. But I be¬ 
lieve fundamentally that the world is a process of being 
saved, of coming gradually through hard work to a 
knowledge of the Truth, the “Truth which shall make you 
free.” I do not believe in the mechanical repetition of 


70 MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 

pious formulae about the Atonement or anything else. 
That belief may come. My future is uncertain enough. 
And I do not believe in any religion which shuts the doors 
of Development. 

And F. B.P He is one of the greatest forces of good 
in the world at the present time. He is perhaps the most 
“real live” Christian that I have ever met. . . . 


CHAPTER IV 


A RUGGER BLUE 

OHORT, thick-set, with a disproportionate breadth of 
^ shoulder, you would never think that this young 
Irishman had a turn of speed which made him famous at 
football. Nor on a first acquaintance would you be at 
all likely to think of him as one who took religion seriously. 

A lively mouse-like brown eye lights up a broad good- 
natured face, while a smile as wide as lips can make it 
adds constantly a touch of whimsical mental quickness to 
the mere structural good-nature. He is one who loves 
lounging in a chair, who wears prodigious woollen waist¬ 
coats in winter, who gets his coat into rare disorder when¬ 
ever he puts his hands in his trouser pockets, who listens 
lazily, who walks slowly, who speaks with an effort, but 
who laughs instantly, and with a lighting up of the whole 
face, at a good retort or a neat witticism, making you 
feel that he is always on the look-out, gratefully, for occa¬ 
sions of laughter. 

I had met him before the house-party came together, 
and I saw him after the guests of that party had gone 
their several ways to nearly every quarter of the world. 
It was, therefore, quite easy for him to tell me his 
story and to answer my questions. 

He said that his father, who is a fine, handsome Irish¬ 
man, belongs to those who have a Church and State re- 

71 


72 


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ligion. It would be impossible for these people, he said, 
to imagine a Church without a State. Their religion is 
part of their politics, part of their class feelings. “My 
father,” he related, “never spoke to me with the least 
intimacy about religion. His exhortations consisted of 
a friendly smack on the back, accompanied by the ad¬ 
monition, ‘Keep straight, old man, 5 as if that could do 
any good to a fellow up against it. All the same, he 
was extremely kind, and a good sportsman. We liked 
him well enough.” 

His mother presents a more difficult problem for his 
autobiography. What can he say of her? To begin 
with, she was a wonderful, an altogether adorable person 
—loving beauty, loving fine poetry, devoted to animals 
and birds, making God perfectly real to her children, so 
that none ever doubted His existence for a moment; mys¬ 
tical, too, speaking to her children of “the Presence of 
Christ in the midst of the world,” teaching them so con¬ 
vincingly about that exquisite moral life that they came 
to think of religion as “helping others”; yet, somehow 
or other, leaving this son, who adored her, who was de¬ 
voted to her, very completely in the dark about vital 
matters, leaving him, as he says, to find out things for 
himself, and to suffer a good deal of avoidable pain in 
the process. 

“When she spoke about the Presence of Christ,” 
he told me, “I hadn’t the ghost of an idea what she 
meant. I just felt it was something beautiful, like the 
sound of wonderful words in the poetry she read to me. 
She certainly did succeed in making the idea of God 
real to all of us. But it was the idea of a God rather a 
long way off, and rather overwhelmingly too almighty 
for our affection. I used to think of Him as One to 


A RUGGER BLUE 


73 


whom I owed obedience, and who knew what I was doing, 
and who could be hurt or displeased when I wasn’t do¬ 
ing my best. Still, it was a good, useful idea; and it was 
mixed up in some way with the beauty of the earth, 
which we all greatly appreciated, and the wonders of 
nature, which filled us with a good deal of curious ad¬ 
miration. In this way one had some sort of standard 
in one’s mind, something at least to look up to.” 

When his moral struggles began, they found him 
wholly ignorant of their origin and significance. He 
was a little boy at school, pugilistic and keen on games, 
cheerful and larky, always ready for springing a joke. 
This strange black cloud slowly gathering over his mind, 
darkening the outer world, giving him a haunted feeling 
inside, troubling his brain and making his heart feel like 
a bruise—whence did it come, what was its meaning? 

All he knew, by instinct—surely a strange instinct 
worth thinking about—was that this urge of his being 
in a particular direction had to be resisted. It was 
something against him. It was something of which the 
mere disposition made him ashamed. He felt as if he 
had been caught doing something underhand. “But the 
fight was the very devil, and at times I was more than 
disheartened—I was pretty sick of myself.” 

This struggle occurred at Rugby. It lessened as he 
moved up in the school. His last year was passed in 
a cleaner atmosphere. He never heard one whispered 
nastiness, never listened to tale or rhyme which could dis¬ 
tress him. He was then nearly nineteen years of age, 
working hard for Cambridge. But the war, which was 
dragging on into its fourth year, did not come to an end, 
and away he went to be a soldier. His nineteenth birth¬ 
day was spent in khaki. 



74 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


He described this experience of the Army as “a pretty 
good shock.” It taught him for the first time, he told 
me, “what the world was like.” He added with a smile, 
“Nothing has ever surprised me since that time.” 

The horror was so great as to be grotesque—as to 
be comical, laughable. It was like seeing oneself for 
the first time in a distorting mirror. He cannot help 
smiling as he speaks of the upside-downness of that 
moral experience. He found himself among men who 
were frankly, freely, unfeignedly bad; who did beastly 
things with their whole will; who used the foulest lan¬ 
guage imaginable because they really relished words 
with that particular sound; who never tired of crude 
stories and dirty limericks; who were by nature, inclina¬ 
tion, and election coarser and more filthy than any 
animal of the field; who were by nature, inclination, and 
election contemptuous of all refinement, all beauty, and 
all virtue—men whose idea of “a good time” was every¬ 
thing bad, men whose idea of “a bad time” was every¬ 
thing good. 

To the Rugby schoolboy this atmosphere was suffi¬ 
ciently repulsive to save him from contamination; but 
his natural friendliness to all sorts and conditions of 
men, his disposition to take life as he finds it and never 
to set himself in any way above his fellows, might have 
had ill consequences for his moral peace had he not 
found in the Army two men as clean-minded and right- 
hearted as himself. “Religion saw me out,” he said; 
“but, all the same, one couldn’t go through that experi¬ 
ence without a change. It made a difference to me.” 

Released from the Army, he went up to Cambridge. 
The atmosphere of the University at this time of stir 




A RUGGER BLUE 


75 


and transition, he found, resembled that of the Army. 
LTndergraduates were soldiers, not schoolboys. But there 
was a vital difference; men discussed other things be¬ 
sides vice. In his own set, he told me, “fellows were try¬ 
ing to find a way out.” There were discussions on the sub¬ 
ject. Some were for cold baths, others for physical exer¬ 
cises, and a few were advocates of developing will-power. 

“So far as my own set was concerned,” he related, 
“public opinion was healthy. Men who went up to town 
for adventures were regarded as contemptible. The 
long-haired, aesthetic type went in for vice, but the 
athletic type didn’t. In the Army, vice of almost every 
kind was considered natural. At the Varsity there was 
a vicious type, and that sort of person was looked upon 
as a degenerate. The feeling among my set in Cam¬ 
bridge was something like this: We know this is wrong; 
how are we to get out of it? When we succumbed to 
temptation we were sick with ourselves. But we had 
sufficient courage to talk the thing over afterwards. 
We didn’t bottle it up, and pretend we kept straight all 
the time. The thing was too unpleasant for that. We 
all wanted to be right, and therefore we sometimes dis¬ 
cussed over our pipes how we were to dissipate the in¬ 
clination which clamoured so terrifically for expression. 
It was with us rather like a discussion about getting fit 
for a race or a football match. We always looked at 
it from the point of view of physical fitness. Self- 
respect came into the matter, although we did not dis¬ 
cuss that point of view; I suppose it was taken for 
granted; what came chiefly into the open of our talks 
was the confounded interruption which this thing intro¬ 
duced into our lives. It was a nuisance, like often catch¬ 
ing cold, and a particularly beastly nuisance.” 


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What strikes him in looking back to those days is 
the strange fact that there was no one to help them. 
Cambridge is full of churches and clergy, but no aid 
came from that quarter. The University shepherds al¬ 
together ignored this suffering of their flocks. No doc¬ 
tor ever lectured on the subject, no moralist offered a 
word of advice. The young men were left to fight the 
matter out among themselves, chiefly in secret. 

He does not mean to suggest that particular notice 
should be paid to this driving temptation of youth; he 
is the last person in the world to desire a concentrated 
attention on such a matter, for that might easily become 
unhealthy. But he thinks the family doctor should pro¬ 
vide the schoolboy with an explanation of this physical 
disturbance, warning him of the consequences of yield¬ 
ing to its urge and giving him a few notions about clean¬ 
liness, physical exercise, and sleep. In particular, he is 
now persuaded that if religion did its normal work, 
youth would have absolute power over all temptations 
that assaulted and hurt the soul, and this without any 
direct mention of sexual appetite. 

While he was at the top of his form as a Rugby foot¬ 
ball player, as popular a man as ever played for his Uni¬ 
versity, he was overtaken by a serious illness which 
brought him to death’s door. It was impossible for him 
to face an English winter. He went first to the South 
of France and often into Italy, reading philosophy for 
his degree, and sadly lamenting his loss of the Rugger 
captaincy—a bereavement for which philosophy pro¬ 
vided no consolation. In this period of lassitude, weak¬ 
ness, and disappointment, the old enemy awoke and 
tortured him worse than before. 


A RUGGER BLUE 


77 


He returned to Cambridge in order to take his degree, 
and, still fighting his moral battle, felt nevertheless that 
he was fighting a lost cause. The attacks were more 
frequent, the victories fewer. “I don’t think,” he says, 
“that I ever actually despaired; but I certainly had the 
distinct feeling that I was going downhill—morally, 
physically, everything. When a fellow gets to the point 
of feeling that it’s not much good fighting he’s in a 
pretty bad way. When he feels that he is going down¬ 
hill, and that nothing can stop him, he’s as good as done 
for. My state was something like that.” 

One day, in this pitiful condition of mind, he went 
to call on a Rugger friend in another college, and 
there, for the first time in his life, came upon F. B., who 
made an immediate impression upon him—the impres¬ 
sion of “a good fellow who knew how to put up a fight.” 
They did not speak of religion or of ethics, but the con¬ 
versation was of such a nature as made our young Irish¬ 
man feel certain that F. B. could help him. When he 
got up to go he walked over to F. B.’s chair and said 
to him, “Look here, I’m going to look you up one day.” 
“Do,” said F. B., and they parted. 

This is how the Rugger Blue tells the rest of the 
story. “F. B. never pursued me. But I couldn’t shake 
the thought of him out of my mind. I got no line from 
him, never heard a word about him, never met him. Yet, 
from that moment of our first meeting, he was hardly 
ever out of my thoughts. I’ve talked to other fellows 
since about their first impressions of F. B., and I find 
that he took many of them as he took me. It was a 
strange strong feeling that he really knew about one, 
and could help one; that he had the right medicine, and 
could effect a real cure. 


78 


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“At last, sure that this feeling was true, and abso¬ 
lutely wretched about myself, I got hold of F. B.’s ad¬ 
dress and went off to see him. He was out. I wanted to 
see him so badly that I sat down at the table in his room 
and began writing him a letter. All of a sudden he 
bounced into the room, breathlessly. ‘I knew there was 
someone needing me,’ he said. It turned out that he was 
on his way to see somebody else when he felt himself 
stopped dead in the street and ordered to go to his 
room. The other appointment was important, so he had 
run all the way back. 

“I stayed ten minutes. We never got near what I 
wanted to say; there was a feeling of haste in that meet¬ 
ing; but I made it plain that I wanted to have a talk 
with him on a private matter, and he promised to come 
to my rooms in Trinity on the approaching Sunday 
evening. 

“That evening was the turning-point in my life. F. 
B. arrived between eight and nine. There was a most 
beautiful sunset; the room was filled with its soft light. 
He sat with his back to the open window. I was facing 
him, looking over the dark outline of his head to John’s 
Church, with its cross shining against the glow of the 
setting sun. It was an extraordinarily still evening. 
F. B. seemed to me a part of its stillness. He wasn’t in 
one of his cheerful moods. He hardly said a word, and 
what he did say was said in a very subdued tone of 
voice. I sat looking at the cross against the sky, won¬ 
dering how the devil I was to tell this man, whom I 
scarcely knew, things about myself which sickened me, 
disgraced me in my own eyes. Somehow or another, I 
can’t tell how it was, the sight of the cross in the sun¬ 
set, so high up in that wonderful air and yet not in the 


A RUGGER BLUE 


79 


least distant from my own darkness, gave me a kind 
of headlong courage. Before I quite knew what I was 
doing I said to him, ‘Well, I may as well tell you all 
about it.’ He said, ‘Go on,’ and waited for me to con¬ 
tinue. I knew then, absolutely, and with a regular blaze 
of certainty, that he could clean me out. I told him the 
whole trouble, everything. 

“I had discussed this thing often enough, but I had 
never before confessed it. With other fellows I had 
spoken of myself as a physical problem, going over 
symptoms, leaving them to infer the actual tumbles; but 
here, for the first time in my life, I had torn up my moral 
life by the roots and held it out to another man. The 
feeling of this was not, as I should have thought, one of 
shame and disgrace, the bitterest humiliation a decent 
fellow can experience; on the contrary, it was one of 
tremendous relief. That in itself surprised me. I had 
the distinct sensation that one gets in dropping a heavy 
load from the shoulders—a feeling of expansion and 
lightness. I remember, too, that I felt as if something 
which I had kept bottled up inside me ever since I could 
remember anything was gone, clean gone. You see, I 
had been feeling fairly desperate, and that made me, 
once I got started, careless of what I said; I didn’t mind 
what I told him; everything came out, everything I 
loathed and hated in myself, and in coming out it seemed 
to stay out. 

“F. B. never spoke a word. I couldn’t see his face 
against the light, and I couldn’t tell how he was taking 
it, and I don’t think I very much cared. I wound up in 
a natural way by telling him that I’d tried athletics, 
that I’d gone in for all sorts of exercises, cold baths, 
and tricks for strengthening the will, but in vain. I was 


80 


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going downhill in my thought life; what was I to do? 
Did he know a cure? Would he advise me? 

“Then F. B. told me everything.” 

Three particulars in that “everything” seemed to 
have brought instant illumination to the mind of this 
undergraduate. First, that moral chaos is inevitable 
when there is no singleness of mind; second, that the 
power which purifies, strengthens, and upholds can only 
become real to those who long for it, and open the doors 
of their cleansed hearts to receive it in silence; and third, 
that no soul, truly conscious of that power, can be satis¬ 
fied with its own salvation. “If you sit still,” he said, 
“it’s hopeless; help other men.” 

That was the supreme test. A man could easily prove 
for himself whether he had genuine singleness of mind, 
genuine contact with the divine power. All he had to do 
was to consider his attitude towards other men. Did he 
want to help others? Had he something in himself which 
could help them? It was no use pretending in this mat¬ 
ter. No help could come to a soul that didn’t really 
want it. No purity could come to a heart that prayed 
for it, “but not yet.” No power could come into a life 
that was selfish. 

“Sin blinds, and sin binds.” Be careful. Think those 
two words over —blinds and binds. Don’t be quite sure 
that what you think you see is the truth. Don’t be quite 
sure that you can really do what you like. Cross- 
examine yourself. You may be blind. You may be a 
slave. While sin is in your mind you are not a free 
creature, you are not a seeing creature. Sin is self; 
while it is there in the mind, whatever form it takes, a 
man may deceive himself to his life’s end, may even go 
so far as to believe that he is good, that he is serving 


A RUGGER BLUE 


81 


God, that he is helping other men. But he isn’t. Sin 
walls God out. “Then will I profess unto them, I never 
knew you.” An awful sincerity, a sincerity that 
searches every crack and corner of the human heart, is 
necessary if God is to enter—the living and the Eternal 
Righteousness. 

Many believe that when they pray for purity they 
really and truly want to be pure. They deceive them¬ 
selves. It is a mere passing emotion. The root of the 
sin is still in their hearts. Two things must go together 
—a deep and passionate hatred of sin, a deep and pas¬ 
sionate craving for God. 

Ask—with singleness of mind—and it shall be given 
you; seek—with singleness of desire—and ye shall find; 
knock—with singleness of purpose—and it shall be 
opened unto you. A good tree cannot bring forth evil 
fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. 

The reasonableness, the inexorable justice of this 
teaching, brought instant illumination to the soul of the 
young Irishman, and he took that plunge away from 
self which baptises the spirit of a man in the living 
waters of eternal life. He really wanted the touch that 
makes personality a whole. 


He said to me that so wonderful was his belief that 
he set about “tackling other men” almost at once. He 
told those men what F. B. had told him, and recom¬ 
mended them to try what he himself was trying, F. B.’s 
method of rising early in the morning to be alone and 
silent with the thought of God in the soul. He told them 
that in these times of silence he had learned to relax his 
whole body, and that with so simple an invitation as, 
“God, come into my soul, and help me,” evil thoughts 




82 


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drained clean out of him, and he really did become vitally 
conscious of invisible power. 

All this he did in so masculine and sincere a fashion 
that a group soon formed in his room of men who really 
longed for spiritual life—a life which they could not find 
in the formal ritual, however beautiful, of churches and 
chapels. F. B., who realised the remarkable power of 
this man to influence others, soon afterwards sent him 
over to Oxford, where his twin brother was at Balliol, 
in order to begin there a similar work of personal 
religion. 

The Balliol brother invited a few men to his room 
and the Cambridge brother talked to them. One of these 
men came from Christ Church; he was impressed, and 
suggested a somewhat bigger gathering at the House. 

“It was there,” says the Rugger Blue, smiling, “that I 
made my first speech. It was pretty rotten. The room 
was full of scholars, and I felt as nervous as a cat. But 
after I had got through they took the matter up in 
discussion, and we debated it from pretty nearly every 
angle till the small hours. What struck them most, I 
think, was the reasonableness of F. B.’s idea that the 
measure of help is the measure of desire. They never 
flinched or jibbed at this idea because it is just. Theo¬ 
logical difficulties were hardly mentioned; the centre of 
discussion was how to get the heart honest in its desire 
for the right thing. We talked and talked till the moon 
was high in the sky. Then we went out into the Quad, 
and walked round and round the fountain, still talking. 
I had a fellow on each arm. Sharing a trouble makes 
friends. The feeling that you can help another fellow 

is one of the best in the world. We were tremendouslv 

* 

happy. They came to see me in my rooms. We made 



A RUGGER BLUE 


83 


a compact which still holds good. Wonderful things 
have come of that visit.” 

Later on, during the Long Vacation, the Rugger Blue 
arranged a house-party in Cambridge, so that a number 
of men should meet F. B. and discuss the whole question 
of personal religion. 

He gave me a characteristic account of that gather¬ 
ing. “I don’t suppose I’ve got much of a reputation for 
tact,” he said, smiling broadly; “in any case, I never 
stopped to think how the people I asked would mix. 
The thing was to get a lot of interesting fellows together, 
and leave F. B. to do the rest. The consequence was we 
had a party of thirty men—Indians, Yanks, Japanese, 
Chinese, Oxford, Cambridge, business men, Members of 
Parliament, and one or two howling swells from the 
War Office. It was most amusing. You saw Etonians 
in white spats talking to prospective socialistic curates! 
And there was extraordinary cordiality. Everyone was 
interested. It seemed as if they had all been life-friends. 
I never knew such a lack of strain in any gathering of 
men. We kept it up for several days. We got right 
down to bedrock—the need for absolute uncompromis¬ 
ing, all-out sincerity. And I’m perfectly certain of this, 
that every man there was helped. Out of that party 
grew the party you came to; and we’ve got another com¬ 
ing on in a month’s time at Cambridge; and after that 
some of us are going to Universities in Germany, and 
some to Universities in the United States.” 

The last time I saw him was at Talbot House, in 
York Road, Lambeth, happy in the midst of very lively 
youth. He has decided to be a doctor, and when he has 


84 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


taken his medical degree he is going to attach himself 
to the Talbot House Movement, placing himself and his 
services entirely at the disposal of that very noble fel¬ 
low, P. B. Clayton, M.C., the adored chaplain of 
Poperinghe, to do what he can to help young men through 
every illness of soul and body. 


CHAPTER V 


PERSONA GRATA 

W HEN the house-party gathered together he was 
crossing the Atlantic, but long before he arrived 
the English garden in which we walked and debated grew 
well used to the sound of his name. I was assured that 
he was “an absolute topper.” I was told that everybody 
loved him. Again and again he figured as the hero of a 
tale or the author of a good saying. The mention of his 
name always brought affectionate smiles to the faces of 
those who knew him. 

Thus dangerously heralded, P. G., as I shall call him 
for brevity’s sake and anonymity’s sake, joined our 
party on the day before it broke up. I had the pleasure 
of hearing him make one very simple and modest speech, 
and the greater pleasure of taking a moonlight walk 
with him under the tall trees of that beautiful garden. 
We agreed together that he should pay me a visit in 
Dorsetshire before he returned to America. He kept 
that promise, taking my family by storm, and leaving 
behind him an impression which is still as gracious and 
fresh as the hour which brought him into our circle. 

His gift of charm, I think, lies in a wholly unconscious 

retention of the graces of boyhood. There is no hard- 

85 


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ness in his character, no sense of firmness in his disposi¬ 
tion, no hint of decisive energy in his mind. If he were a 
writing-man, Macaulay would frighten him and Lamb 
would be very dear to him. Among the dogmatists he 
would be all at sea; among the men of “push and go” 
he would be trodden underfoot. He suggests to you 
that his mind is still full of wonder, like the mind of a 
child. 

The memories of his defeats have left no bitterness ; 
the remembrance of his victories has brought no sense 
of triumph. His pilgrim’s progress, I think, has some¬ 
thing of the radiance and innocence that we find in 
Bunyan’s page. Everything in his nature is modest, 
gentle, and sincere. He is in this world as a shy boy 
must be accounted one of the guests at a roystering 
party. You feel that he will never quite settle down, 
never come to feel that all this bustle and stir are in the 
true nature of reality. He sees something that the rest 
of us do not see, but is afraid to talk about it, lest he 
draw attention to himself. He makes you think of Mr. 
Dick without his delusion, or of William Blake without 
his insanity. Every motion of his spirit is the expression 
of a profound and incorruptible simplicity—a simplic¬ 
ity so wholly unconscious that it makes everybody love 
him. Nothing in the least theatrical has ever brushed 
even the outskirts of his mind. 

He spent his boyhood in a small American country 
town, characterised by all the respectabilities and pru¬ 
deries of a thoroughly compromising civilisation, en¬ 
tirely without the inspiration of the great realities. 

He was one of three children, and the only son. Be¬ 
tween father and son, so far as religion was concerned, 
there was a wall, but between son and mother no obsta- 


PERSONA GRATA 


87 


cle of any kind. He believed everything she told him, 
and saw nothing in her life to criticise or to disturb his 
worship. She was orthodox, but not narrow-minded; 
he loved her completely. 

The first incident in his spiritual life occurred when 
his elder sister, seven years older than himself, returned 
from college with a definite religious experience. This 
change in his sister enabled him to comprehend the dif¬ 
ference between “first-hand and second-hand religion.” 
He describes the change in his sister as the change from 
sleep to waking. Something of the same nature occurred 
in himself; he was no longer asleep, but could not feel him¬ 
self properly awake. 

One thing greatly struck him in this transitional con¬ 
dition of mind—the visible fact that his sister’s life was 
now “propagating in the lives of other people.” This 
seemed to him a very wonderful thing, and the thought 
that it was possible for one person to make another 
person happy, to make an indifferent person active, and 
a bad person good, stuck in his mind. 

But, though he took part in the religious activities 
of his school, he found that he didn’t fit, that he wasn’t 
in the least like his sister, and therefore he came to the 
conclusion that he was not yet properly awake. This 
idea of sleep and waking came to him with the simple 
naturalness characteristic of all his thinking. It was 
not an idea put into his mind by somebody else. He 
came of himself to think of people as asleep, half-asleep, 
half-awake, awake, broad-awake. 

He seems to have passed through boyhood without 
moral disturbance of any kind. His one distress was 
the haunting thought that he could not establish a more 
real relation with the God of orthodox religion. But 


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this thought was without distress. It rose into con¬ 
sciousness between periods of singular happiness, for 
he was a boy made for the delights of schooldays. 

His battle began in his first term at college. He went 
to Yale, which is in New Haven, and for the first time in 
his life breathed the atmosphere of a town which had the 
flavour of a great city. All the placid provincialism of 
the little country town in which he had dreamed and 
mused away the years of boyhood was consumed in the 
rakish gaiety of this University town. A walk down 
Chapel Street was enough to set his head spinning. 
This street, with its fashionable shops, its numerous 
theatres, and its cosmopolitan restaurants, is a favour¬ 
ite parade for harlots and “adventure girls”—pretty 
girls from the chorus of comic operas, and girls of the 
town whose moral standards are on the same level as 
their standards in manners, literature, and art. The 
effect it makes on a provincial is one of rebuke; he is 
persuaded to feel that he is narrow, dull, wanting in 
spirit, a prisoner to fear, a captive of stupidity. The 
bright people smiling and laughing in the sunshine of 
that cheerful thoroughfare seem to flaunt a superior 
liberty and a higher courage in the dazed eyes of the 
youthful provincial. They are not the victims of illu¬ 
sion; it is he, gaping at them, who is deceived. They 
are not going down to perdition; but he wanting to join, 
and yet afraid, is on the road to mediocrity. 

Nothing in the religion of this boy was proof against 
the temptations of Chapel Street. For the first time in 
his life he experienced an uprush of those feelings which 
are so powerful to create the highest happiness of the 
human soul, so powerful to destroy the last rags of its 
liberty and self-respect. He was tempted, and the temp- 


PERSONA GRATA 


89 


tation seemed to foul his spirit. He could not withstand 
the call of apparent beauty and apparent gladness. 

This tremendous pressure on his purity drove him to 
religion as a refuge. He describes it as a home to fly to 
while he was at college; a narcotic which brought relief; 
an argument, a persuasion, but not light. 

On his way home at the end of his first term he passed 
through New York. There was a great storm crashing 
over the city, and he watched it with his thoughts set on 
his own burden. That burden, he says, was awful. He 
asked himself, Why isn’t Christ personal to me? and in 
asking that question a sigh broke from his lips, and with 
the escape of that sigh something of his burden seemed 
to go. He felt that he had begun to get an answer. 

When he returned to Yale it was with the decision to 
follow his sister’s example, and “to propagate in other 
lives.” The experience was disheartening. One of the 
students was very ill, perhaps dying, and P. G. went to 
see him. They talked together, but “I couldn’t get 
through to him,” he says; “there were barriers be¬ 
tween us as big as mountains.” 

He spoke of another man he tried to influence. “This 
man,” he said, “belonged to the type of attractive sinner 
—a delightful person, a man with personality; charming, 
with magic about him, lovable. He was intellectual, and 
could floor my persuasions with arguments gathered from 
history and human experience and science. He was quite 
friendly; he knew I cared for him; I think he liked me; 
and he was the kind of man who appreciated sympathy; 
but nothing I could say made the smallest difference to 
him. You see, what I was doing was to try to superim¬ 
pose myself on other people; I was trying to do them 


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good from a height on which I wasn’t really standing. 
That is fatal.” 

Intellectual difficulties presented themselves. Ortho¬ 
dox religion was exposed to the attacks of clever young 
men who knew more science than theology. There were, 
indeed, intellectual courses at the college which seemed 
to him directed against religion. He was shaken, but he 
suffered no mental anguish. Involved in theological dis¬ 
putes, he had nothing to say. He retired from them to 
read his Bible more industriously and to pray more earn¬ 
estly for light. 

His sympathy with men took him into all quarters. 
One night he found himself in a room full of rackety 
students, who presently began to tell coarse stories. P. 
G. rebuked them, opposed himself single-handed to the 
whole group. “I was dealing with symptoms, not causes,” 
he relates, with a smile; “instead of opposing myself to 
the group, I ought to have waited and reasoned with in¬ 
dividuals.” 

He had now made up his mind to attach himself to the 
Christian Student Movement in India. Temptation had 
eased. Praver meant much more to him than it had ever 
meant in the past. Religion had at last become appar¬ 
ently real. Yet a trouble remained which preyed upon 
his peace of mind. “Religion was real to me,” he says, 
“but I could not give it away.” 

He left the University and went out to India. For 
three years, loving his work, he remained in that county, 
forming, as he says, superficial friendships, but doing 
nothing really effective to stop the appalling vice which 
existed among young Indians. 

He returned to America, and joined the famous semi- 


PERSONA GRATA 


91 


nary at Hartford, Connecticut. For a year he was pro¬ 
foundly happy. He loved his freedom, the peace of the 
seminary, and the long, unbroken hours of study. He 
thought he was fitting himself to be a teacher of the 
Christian religion. 

The second year brought disillusion, and something 
akin to terror. Temptations assaulted him with a quite 
incredible force, a quite sickening persistency. Doubt, 
too, was for ever whispering to his conscience. He found 
that his heart was full of impurity, his mind as full of in¬ 
tellectual dishonesty. He was hedging, compromising, 
pretending. Rather than cause pain to others he felt 
that he must go on with the religious life; but it began 
to be to him a shadow, a phantasm, something out of a 
forgotten past that had no meaning for a present ter¬ 
ribly and overwhelmingly insistent. 

He said to me, “I really do not know any form of men¬ 
tal misery so tragic as the misery of the theological 
student—the afflicted disciple. The men in these colleges 
and seminaries are the hungriest groups in the world. 
They have good motives, but no direction. They are 
assailed by temptations which make them ashamed. They 
do things which choke them with a sense of self-contempt, 
a sense of hypocrisy. The atmosphere is more corrupting 
and damning than the atmosphere of Universities. One 
feels that these places are full of repression, full of un¬ 
uttered sin. There’s something furtive about them. You 
don’t get public drunkenness, public gambling, public im¬ 
morality. There’s no visible and healthy clash of good 
and evil. Good is taken for granted, and absence of evil 
is also taken for granted. But the evil is there; and the 
good—well, it is not easy to feel its influence. As for the 
professors, their only experience of religion is a memory. 


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They tell the students what happened years ago, not 
what happened coming down in the tram, or in the home 
last night. They have no reality for these desperate 
students, who spend half their time studying the soul¬ 
killing controversies of long-ago theologies, and the 
other half in fighting temptations sharp as steel. People 
wonder at drunkenness and ‘rags’ among Varsity men; 
I think I know how those things come about. They are 
attempts to break away from repression, to escape from 
a maddening sense of conflicting duality.” 

One of the students at Hartford had been a miner 
and a sailor; he had made a fortune and spent it. He 
was about thirty-five years of age, and used to write 
sermons for the other students. He had a gift for 
preaching which created admiration among the younger 
men. P. G. liked this strange man and talked to him, 
tried to “get below the surface to the place where he 
lived.” One day the ex-miner said to him, “Shall I tell 
you what I am? I’m a damned hypocrite. I’ve been 
twice with women quite lately.” 

P. G. had the terror always before his eyes that he too 
might fall. One night in New York he had to rush into 
the streets and walk as hard as he could go for miles, 
fearing that the temptation would beat him. He says, 
“I was a divided personality. There were two of me; 
no unity. I felt that I might fall; yet I felt that nothing 
on earth should make me.” 

He was in this state of mind, seeing little hope before 
him of avoiding hypocrisy, when F. B. came to Hart¬ 
ford as an Extension Lecturer. His subject was, “How 
to deal with Other Men; how to get into their Lives.” 
One day P. G. was walking in the grounds of the college 


PERSONA GRATA 


93 


when someone, coming up from behind, took his arm, 
and said, “This is P. G., isn’t it?” P. G. turned to 
find F. B. at his side, smiling in the far-away manner 
which sometimes takes the place of his usual alert¬ 
ness. He began to speak of someone in India who had 
met P. G. 

The immediate feeling of P. G. was one of convic¬ 
tion that he could speak with complete frankness and 
confidence to this stranger—stranger no longer, for the 
touch of his hand had conveyed an instant feeling of 
friendliness. 

“I knew,” he told me, “that here was a man of under¬ 
standing sympathy, one who wouldn’t be shocked, one 
who could help. Another thing I knew—that there was 
no professionalism about him, that he wouldn’t think of 
me as ‘a case,’ that he was a genuine man genuinely in¬ 
terested in another man. I remember, too, I had the 
feeling that in this man there was plenty of time. Noth¬ 
ing suggested commercial bustle. He seemed to me 
to be living in a wonderful spiritual leisure. We parted 
with nothing much said between us, but on the follow¬ 
ing day, after breakfast, he came and sat with me on the 
garden steps in the morning sun. For the first time in 
my life I told another man exactly how I stood, and 
something of what I had suffered. I turned to him 
and said, ‘My mind is filled with a cloud of evil thoughts; 
why do I have these evil thoughts?’ To my astonish¬ 
ment he said at once, ‘Why, P. G., I have those evil 
thoughts,’ as if he were surprised that they should worry 
me. Directly he said that I had the feeling he knew 
what to do with them. There was a deep sense of relief 
in my mind. He said nothing more to help me. All he 
added was that I must come to see him later in the day. 


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But I felt extraordinarily happy, just as if the fight was 
over. 

“When we came to have our talk he told me that the 
reason I was tortured was simply because I was fight¬ 
ing temptation direct. The attempt at repression was 
the cause of my suffering. It was necessary for me to 
leave al] such fatal egoism and to get out into the lives 
of other men—altruism, Christianity. He spoke quietly 
and convincingly. But I wanted it my own way, and 
comfortable; I didn’t want to pay the price; so I chal¬ 
lenged him to tell me why I could not get relief in the 
old way, by prayer and reading the Bible. He told 
me that I had to get into the lives of other men, and 
that was all there was to it. Selfishness was my sin, I 
wasn’t thinking of others. 

“One day, shortly after this, I was walking in town 
with him when we came across two drunken men. He 
told me to take one while he took the other. I was para¬ 
lysed by fear. I hid behind a telegraph-post. But F. 
B. collared his man and saw him home. Next day, in the 
midst of a meeting, F. B. had an irresistible impulsion to 
go out into the street; someone there wanted him. He 
left the meeting, went out into the street, and there was 
the drunken man of last night. F. B. put that man on 
the right road. 

“When he told me this I felt poverty-stricken. Re¬ 
ligion began to seem to me something that was not 
natural. I should never be able to handle other men as 
F. B. handled them. I was like a young surgeon with 
trembling knife confronting a new operation. 

“I confessed this feeling to F. B., and he took me a 
step further; he taught me the principles of religion. 
He explained that I felt helpless because my religion 


PERSONA GRATA 


95 


was not in action. This meant that I had never ex¬ 
perienced ‘the expulsive power of a new affection.’ If 
I had real love for men I should be willing to share my 
temptations with them, to confess to them my secret 
thoughts, to get alongside of their souls, to work with 
them and for them to the end of redemption. Every 
man, he said, could test the reality of his religion by 
finding out whether he would make sacrifices to help 
others. 

“I saw what he meant intellectually, but I didn’t want 
to come to it. I told myself that there was something 
immodest in his suggestion, that my spiritual life was 
too sacred to talk about—as if anything is too sacred 
that helps other men! So I withstood him. 

“One day he surprised me very much by saying that 
he was going back to China for six months and wanted 
me to go with him. I had another year to run at Hart¬ 
ford. China did not attract me. I’m not sure that 
F. B. attracted me. I rather shrank from his too per¬ 
sonal methods. But he persuaded me, and those six 
months stretched into two years, and those two years are 
the happiest memories in my life. 

“Before I left Hartford I decided to try F. B.’s 
method. I went to a theological student w T ho seemed to 
me to be troubled, to be suffering, and confessed to him 
my own secret sin—impurity. The feeling of relief was 
extraordinary. The student came to life, confessed his 
secret sin to me, and ended our talk by saying, ‘Prayer is 
going to mean something now; the Bible is going to 
mean something now.’ To both of us it seemed that 
religion had never been real to us before, never been 
alive, and that now it was the very biggest thing alive. 

“The revelation came to me in this conviction: God 



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floods in when a man is honest. I had been looking at 
religion from the intellectual point of view. I had never 
really seen it as the supreme power of morality. I had 
never really apprehended that religion redeems and 
dominates the sinful heart of man—not merely the sin of 
impurity, but the entire moral life—selfishness and all 
our moral hesitancies. 

66 1 came to myself in confessing to another man, that 
is to say, in being perfectly honest. For the first time in 
my life I felt that there was no pretence in my soul, that 
another man whom I wanted to help knew me as I knew 
myself, and that I really and truly did want to help 
him—that I had torn away all pretensions in order that 
I might be able to help him. 

“I am convinced that confession plays a tremendous 
part in religious life. I don’t think it is too much to 
say that until a man confesses his sin to another man 
he can never really be spiritually vital. One knows 
scores of men who carry guilty consciences, and who 
think they square accounts by confessing their sins in 
secret to God, and genuinely trying not to commit those 
sins again. Such men can never help another; such 
men haven’t the ghost of an idea what redemption means. 
They pretend. Their religion is a form. Their life is 
a dead letter. 

“An interesting story occurs to me. A friend of 
mine wanted very much to help a particular friend of 
his who was involved in some trouble with a girl. He 
tried and tried, in vain. He asked me why he couldn’t 
do this thing. He wasn’t lacking in sympathy; he 
wanted to help his friend; why couldn’t he? I got him 
to go over his past life. He found that there was an un¬ 
confessed sin on his conscience. As a schoolboy he had 




PERSONA GRATA 


97 


stolen money from his father. It was a hard task, but 
he went to his father and confessed his sin. The result 
was not only ability to help his friend, but a real pente- 
costal joy in his own heart. He said to me, ‘Now 
I’m ready to go all the way in this thing.’ How 
simply a man can be born again! One act of honesty. 
Reality!” 

Let me interrupt the narrative for a moment to re¬ 
mind the reader that in Morton Prince’s The Uncon¬ 
scious many stories showing that some forgotten 
incident in the past, but not forgotten by the uncon¬ 
scious mind, may prey upon physical health and even 
be the cause of serious physical ills. 

I remember one case in particular. A woman sub¬ 
ject to epileptic fits was hypnotised by Dr. Prince, 
and taken back by him through all the days of her life 
in search for the shock which had deranged her mental 
processes. He discovered from her unconscious mind 
that once, as a little girl, she had been sitting alone in 
her nursery with a kitten in her lap, that this kitten had 
suddenly had a fit, that she had screamed for her nurse, 
terrified by the kitten, and that the nurse did not come for 
a very long time. The doctor awakened her from hyp¬ 
nosis, told her of this incident, of which she had no 
memory, and so disposed of the cause of her trouble. 
Prom this case it will be seen that even things which the 
conscious mind has forgotten may remain in the folds 
of being, festering the entire life. 

Religion, one may observe, seems to have known by 
instinct what painful science is only now beginning to 
suspect. Always it has taught the need of confession, 
restitution, and a cleansed heart. 


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P. G., at any rate, is insistent on the power of con¬ 
fession to fill the spirit with an entirely new sense of 
life. He lays all his emphasis there. To him the matter 
is not in the least mysterious. Confession is merely a 
sign of an absolute honesty within, a sign that the long 
attempt to compromise and equivocate is over, a sign 
that the personality is at last unified, not divided, a sign 
that the soul really means what it says, and truly believes 
what it has hitherto only professed or tried to believe. 

By confession he means no formal act of clericalism, 
performed to square accounts with the Deity, but a 
most personal act on the part of one man to another 
—particularly to the man one is trying to help—an 
act that attests honesty and brings one man close to 
another, in sympathy and reality. 

He is the more certain of the power of confession 
from his experience in the East. He told me that he 
found he could do nothing with men in China, Japan, 
and Korea until he persuaded them to confess their 
secret sins, but that directly this confession was made 
they experienced precisely the same joyous relief which 
he had experienced. The confessions of young men in 
China, Japan, and Korea, he says, fit perfectly in with 
the confessions of young men in England and America. 
He agrees with F. B., “Crows are black the whole world 
over.” 

“I saw many miracles in the East,” he said to me, 
“and I am now seeing like miracles in America and in 
England. All the world over sin is darkening men’s 
lives, and hypocrisy is paralysing the power of religion 
to save them. Religion is a universal force. It does 
not much matter, I think, what theological language is 


PERSONA GRATA 


99 


used to express the immense miracle of redemption. 
What matters is making it real to suffering men that 
directly they are absolutely honest in desiring release 
from the slavery of sin, God will flood into their hearts, 
and they really will be born again. Redemption cannot 
come, I’m perfectly certain of this, until the heart is so 
hungry for it that it will confess everything to another. 
One has to be awfully real oneself to experience reality. 

“I remember a strange incident in China. I came 
across, in one of the mission colleges, a Chinese teacher 
who was a complete hypocrite. He drank, he gambled, 
and he had relations with married women. He was a 
man of some intellect and no little power. One night, 
sitting over the fire, he said to me, ‘All this Christianity 
is a legend. Jesus, you know, is not an historical figure. 
I never say my prayers. I teach, because I can teach. 
But,’ with a shrug of his shoulders, ‘I do not believe 
what I teach.’ I took no notice of his effort to get me 
into a theological argument. I spoke of the Christ of 
universal human experience, the Christ who saves, the 
Christ who redeems, the Christ who had made all the 
difference to me. He turned, with a strange light in 
his eyes, looking at me over his shoulder, his hands still 
extended to the fire, and ‘How would I take that medi¬ 
cine?’ he asked. I said to him, ‘Will you pray from 
your heart, “Jesus, if there be a Jesus, I want you to 
clean me up”? ’ To my surprise, then and there, look¬ 
ing into the fire, he prayed that prayer. Then he got 
up and left me. The next day he came to me and said, 
‘You know, this thing works marvellously.’ It was his 
first experience of personal religion. He had never be¬ 
fore seen redemption as the central fact of Christianity. 
He said to me, ‘Now I feel on top.’ He had never before 



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looked at religion as a real power that enters the heart, 
changes the life, and gives a new birth to the soul. 
I am quite sure he had never wanted to be cleaned 
up. 

“What strikes me most in all these wonderful experi¬ 
ences—for it is a wonderful thing to see a man born 
again—is their extreme simplicity. Directly a man is 
really honest the miracle occurs. Many deceive them¬ 
selves. They protest that they want to be rid of sin, 
and it isn’t really true. Others do want to be rid of 
their sin, but selfishly, for their own ease, their own 
self-respect, or because they are afraid of being found 
out. Those find it difficult. But when a man hungers 
and thirsts to be rid of sin so that he may help others, it 
really is extraordinary how soon the step is taken from 
darkness to light, from sleep to waking. It seems 
natural and right, when one considers that the message 
of Jesus was unselfishness. There can’t be any vital 
experience of religion where selfishness has got a hold, 
whatever form it takes. What surprises one is not the 
miracle of conversion, but the ease with which even very 
good men will go on deceiving themselves all their life 
long; men who are moral and philanthropic, but with 
some root of selfishness in their hearts, which prevents 
them from ever experiencing a new birth or saving a 
man who is lost. Why do these people deceive them¬ 
selves? It seems such a mad idea, attempting to hood¬ 
wink God. I suppose they are not properly awake, that 
they don’t understand what they are doing.” 

Few of the followers of F. B. exercise so great an in¬ 
fluence over others as this gracious person whose voice 
and smile, could I convey them to this “brutish paper,” 


PERSONA GRATA 


101 


would endear him to the reader and give a deeper mean¬ 
ing to his words. 

I spoke to him a little of theological difficulties. He 
admitted those difficulties, and agreed that they will 
have to be faced; but he said, very modestly and unpre¬ 
tentiously, that redemption would remain the central 
truth of religious life whatever might be the future lan¬ 
guage of theology. 

“There is no fact so great in the experience of men,” 
he said quietly, “as the fact that a soul on the extreme 
edge of destruction can be redeemed to life merely by 
turning round—sincerely turning right round.” 

The most beautiful of all the parables certainly 
teaches that the Father can do nothing until the son 
has turned his face homewards. 


CHAPTER VI 


BEAU IDEAL 

C ONSPICUOUS in the house-party for his good looks 
was a man well known at Eton and Oxford, whom 
we will here call Beau Ideal. Over six feet, with a fresh 
boyish complexion, clear bright eyes, thick fair hair very 
carefully brushed, a clipped moustache, and something 
a little dandiacal about his clothes, this young Hercules 
of twenty-four English summers looked exactly like the 
circulating library’s idea of an officer in the Brigade 
of Guards. 

I noticed that while he lounged in a deep chair, speak¬ 
ing with a tired drawl, as though discussion bored him, 
he was activity itself when he got upon his feet. One 
caught sight of him at times in voluminous flannels and 
coarse-knitted sweater hurrying away to get an hour’s 
tennis; or missed him from the luncheon table to learn 
that he had gone off to play in a cricket match. Some¬ 
times it seemed to me that behind his boyish handsome¬ 
ness there smouldered the flames of a once difficult temper. 
But the chief impression he made on one’s mind was that 
of the perfectly healthy, sport-loving, and well-bred 
young Briton at his topmost best. Whether he had 
brains was another matter. How he came to be inter¬ 
ested in religion puzzled me a good deal. 

102 


BEAU IDEAL 


103 


He amused me one night by an answer he made to a 
challenging question by F. B. The Surgeon of Souls 
had been contrasting, with a deep and rather reproach¬ 
ful seriousness, the way in which the movement for per¬ 
sonal religion was spreading in the Universities of the 
United States with that movement in the British Isles. 
He said it was up to English Varsity men to see that 
much more energy was put into this work; what did they 
propose to do about it? (Silence.) What suggestions 
had they to make? (Silence.) Surely some of them 
had at least a part of an idea in their minds. 

After some slow-dragging moments of nervous silence, 
Beau Ideal, sprawling in a big chair, lazily made answer, 
“If you told Oxford men that an Oxford man wanted to 
talk to them about religion they wouldn’t pay the small¬ 
est attention to you, beyond a glance to see if you were 
drunk or off your head. But I believe there is another 
University in England; if I remember rightly, at a place 
called Cambridge; and I rather think that if you told 
Oxford men a fellow from this extraordinary place 
wanted to speak to them they’d go, even if it was to 
hear about religion, just out of curiosity to see what 
manner of animal Cambridge produces.” 

In this way, rousing the Cambridge men of the party 
to intellectual reprisals, Beau Ideal made a valuable 
contribution to the debate. Behind the persiflage was 
an idea, and within the irony a truth. 

Seldom have I been more out of my reckoning with a 
human being than I presently found myself in the case 
of this handsome young giant. He came to see me in 
London, and alone together I discovered that he was 
not merely interested in religion as a possible theory of 


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existence, but that he was truly consumed with a fer¬ 
vorous passion for all those intellectual and moral sacri¬ 
fices which orthodox religion so obviously calls upon a 
man to make. Instead of a dandy I had caught a 
fanatic. 

His manner completely changed. There was the same 
lounging disposition of the big body, but no drawl in 
the speech, no sleepy languor of the eyelids. Indeed, 
there were moments when quite visibly he became elec¬ 
tric, and had to put restraint on his enthusiasm; mo¬ 
ments when his quick and eager words broke suddenly 
down, and a blush of misgiving came into his face, a look 
of inquiry darting from his eyes, as though the mind 
would discover whether it was not prejudicing its case 
by moral emotionalism. Wonderful to relate, Beau 
Ideal is a genuine firebrand. 

From boyhood, I learned, he has had the greatest 
difficulty in bridling a hot temper. The sound of a 
voice could irritate him, an ugly fashion in clothes make 
him hate the wearer, an opinion with which he did not 
agree rouse in him an impulse almost homicidal. He has 
tramped many miles over the highlands merely to escape 
from people. He has sailed and fished for days only 
as an excuse to flee from society that rubbed him the 
wrong way. Games, which he plays with tremendous 
vigour, were the chief outlet in his boyhood for irritable 
energies boiling up within him to the fever point of ex¬ 
asperation. 

When he went to Christ Church he was still first and 
foremost an athlete, but there was a disposition in him 
to scholarship, and he was soon regarded as an under¬ 
graduate with an intellectual future. He found the ten- 


BEAU IDEAL 


105 


tative, superior, and philosophical temperament of Ox¬ 
ford entirely to his liking. His set in the House was the 
best of its time. It was composed of men who took 
themselves seriously, but were careful not to let it be 
thought that they took themselves too seriously. In 
this set Beau Ideal, by grace of body and charm of mind, 
was a figure of some eminence. 

His thoughts were occupied chiefly by politics and 
philosophy. He contracted an interest for social prob¬ 
lems. The world appeared to him as a diverting problem 
providing endless opportunities for delightful theories— 
a serious problem, but a problem all the better for being 
regarded with a certain irony of outlook. 

Across this intellectual life ran the interrupting diag¬ 
onal of a sex pride. He knew very well that he was a 
rather out-of-the-way good-looking person. He liked 
to notice the effect he produced on entering a ballroom. 
It pleased him immensely that the prettiest girls, wher¬ 
ever he went, gave him special glances and wanted him 
very much to dance with them. He showed no outward 
sign of this pardonable vanity; indeed, he assumed an 
intentional modesty to aggravate the effect of his 
charm; but inwardly he was about as full of foppish 
conceit as any “lady’s man” that ever lived. 

So his days were passing, not innocent of feverish 
sin, but chiefly taken up with philosophy, games, danc¬ 
ing, and affairs of the wardrobe, when one summer’s 
night he was introduced to F. B. in Peck Quad. F. B. 
suggested that they should take a walk round the Quad, 
and began to ask Beau Ideal what he was thinking about. 
Beau Ideal, rather puzzled by this direct invasion of his 
privacies, but setting it down to the crudeness of Yankee 
manners, began to speak about life in general—his in- 


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terest in eugenics, birth control, the problems of popu¬ 
lation, and the chief social difficulties of the time. 

All of a sudden F. B. said to him: “Those things 
aren’t disturbing you. You know what’s robbing you of 
peace, don’t you?” And, then and there, as Beau Ideal 
puts it, he began “stirring up the mud.” 

It was a beautiful, still summer night, with pale stars 
above the roofs of the college, the moon coming up in a 
mist of silver, the sound of the ancient city at that late 
hour little more than a far-distant sea-murmur. Beau 
Ideal could hear his heart beating as he listened to the 
trenchant words of this inexplicable man walking at 
his side; he could feel his cheeks colouring in the cool 
air as the mud stirred up by the American got into the 
circulation of his blood and mounted to his conscience. 
Never before had a man spoken to him as this man was 
now speaking. 

Left to himself, with a disturbed consciousness and 
a guilty conscience, Beau Ideal tried in vain to take up 
the threads of his former life. F. B. had said something 
to him which made the fact of sin a towering and menac¬ 
ing fact of human life. He could not escape from the 
thought that all the social and political problems with 
which he had hitherto amused his intellect—problems 
convenient enough as topics of conversation—were so 
many molehills in comparison with this single moun¬ 
tainous fact of human sin. 

Discussions with some of his friends who had gone 
rather deeper into this same great matter with the 
American Surgeon of Souls presently led Beau Ideal to 
lend the light of his countenance to the proceedings of 
the Christian Student Movement in Christ Church. If 


BEAU IDEAL 


107 


you can imagine Apollo stepping down from Olympus 
to help an infant class to appreciate the poetry of Mrs. 
Hemans or Martin Tupper you may suitably figure to 
yourself the attitude of Beau Ideal in his association with 
the Christian Student Movement’s activities at the 
House. 

He was careful from the first to make it understood 
that his interest in that movement was social and politi¬ 
cal. Where that movement was concerned with issues 
worthy the attention of an intellectual man of the world, 
there our young god was willing to appear in the Ro¬ 
man garments of a Mecasnas. As to anything so con¬ 
trary to the established customs of good breeding as 
personal discussions concerning the hypothetical rela¬ 
tions of an unproved soul with a theoretical God, clearly 
in that respect nothing could be expected of him. 

But F. B. had stirred up the mud so effectually that 
when he was alone by himself Beau Ideal was far too 
conscious of his own personal sins—not other people’s 
sins—for peace of mind. Instead of the boyish irrita¬ 
bility which had once made such a turmoil of his days 
he found himself now assailed by a profound and morbid 
unrest of soul which robbed him of peace and dogged 
every step of his happiness. 

To be rid of such a tax on his patience he played 
games harder than ever, and harder than ever applied 
himself to a study of philosophy. It seemed to him that 
with a healthy mind in a healthy body he would pres¬ 
ently be able not only to form a satisfactory thesis of 
existence, but to get rid of certain bad habits which he 
did not doubt degraded him. 

But the unrest continued. It continued till he found 


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himself confronted by a choice, which he calls the choice 
between philosophy or religion. Either he had to re¬ 
main outside the struggle of man’s soul, looking on at it 
with interest, patience, tolerance, and a calming irony, 
or he had to take a plunge into a quite other fount and 
cleanse himself of that which fouled him, body and soul. 

All his inclinations were towards philosophy; all his 
heredity was against religion. 

In this frame of mind he went away to Sark, on 
purpose to fight the matter out with himself and by 
himself. It happened that one day, sitting on a rock 
in a high wind, with a great and staggering sea breaking 
in vast commotion against that ironbound coast, so 
that he was drenched with spindrift and swayed by the 
gale, this problem resolved itself into one clear question 
which thus presented itself to his mind: 

Is it true, or untrue, that philosophy, regarded as a 
mathematical system of thought, fails to provide an 
adequate answer to the question propounded by a sys¬ 
tem within it, namely ethics, as to how a man is to live 
according to his highest lights—or, as Aristotle would 
say, Korea tov <5p6ov Xoyov, according to right reason? 

He began his answer by confessing that a man does 
not need philosophy to teach him what is right and what 
is wrong. Philosophy is unnecessary to tell a man what 
he should do in the sphere of conduct. Within the man 
himself, born with him into this world, an inherent part 
of his nature, perhaps as old as the first movement of 
evolution, is a disposition towards his best, at any rate 
a recognition that there is a best and that there is a 
worst. 

Then he saw that human progress—that is to say, 


BEAU IDEAL 


109 


human happiness and human freedom—had chiefly de¬ 
pended on man’s response to this movement within him 
—this movement in the direction of the best which had 
so often in the history of humanity involved the supreme 
sacrifice. 

At this point he asked himself what part philosophy 
had played in that struggle. Many great philosophers 
had elevated man to a noble dignity by the exercise of 
purely rational faculties, but what part had philosophy 
itself played in freeing the multitude from the tyranny 
of evil habits and ennobling the moral character of the 
human race? 

His own experience told him that philosophy is often 
employed to blind men’s eyes to the real issues, to find 
an excuse for delinquency, to explain away a cancer of 
moral life, to justify in theory practices which the con¬ 
science of the individual tells him to be wrong. The 
moral life of Plato—who cares to think about it? Ac¬ 
ton’s intellectual contempt for those who would find in 
climate or in chronology an excuse for evil—how justi¬ 
fiable! Plausible explanations, how often is this the 
work of philosophy in action! 

Another idea presented itself to his mind. Philosophy 
gives man a false notion of liberty by challenging all 
rules and refusing to recognise the authority of, or the 
reverence due to, anything which is not explicable to the 
contemporary reason. It destroys all standards save 
those of its own time and its own creation. It is the 
declared enemy of humble faith. It will not take for 
granted even the most sacred intuitions of the human 
soul. It is incompatible with earnest moral endeavour. 
In nearly all its aspects it is destructive and negative. 

Such, he tells me, were the thoughts thrown up by the 


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ocean under the stern cliffs of Sark—thoughts no less 
numerous, troubled and jumbled than the waves of that 
disordered sea. 

The battle, of course, was only half fought. He was 
left merely with the ruins of a boy’s faith in philosophy 
as a breakwater against humanity’s sea of troubles. 

“It is the prerogative of youth, I suppose,” he wrote 
to me of that time, “to rail against things as they are, 
and in those days I shared keenly in that dissatisfaction, 
and included myself among the least satisfactory 
phenomena. The failure of materialism came to me as a 
profound conviction; and, against that, the necessity 
to make use of spiritual force. It became clear that the 
only ultimate significance in life was genuine moral 
effort. I suppose the appeal came most directly as a 
question of the general welfare and happiness of people. 
They themselves had failed to promote their own welfare. 
What must be done?” 

A little later he was able to say: “Even the most 
superficial study of the Christian religion was enough 
to show me that in the sophisticated atmosphere of 
modern times, in a welter of sex psychology and nec¬ 
romancy of nearly every kind, an age of few restraints 
and no reverences, an age with no holy of holies for ‘the 
unsanctified curiosities of common men,’ the simple ethic 
of Jesus would work a healthy change. Honesty in 
commerce, sincerity in the Church, sympathy between 
employer and employed, purity and decency in social 
life, idealism and earnestness in political life—what a 
change would such things effect! Pari passu with these 
things came the challenge of one’s own conscience—the 
searching thought of one’s own personal morality. I 




BEAU IDEAL 


111 


heard a friend say of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, ‘He was old 
fashioned; he believed in God.’ That set me thinking. I 
thought to myself, How much better it would be for the 
world if more people believed in God. I got so far as 
to acknowledge that for myself, if I were not to be dis¬ 
loyal to conscience, it was essential for me to believe in 
God.” 

Thus matters stood with him when he was invited to 
the house party at Cambridge of which mention has 
been made in the chapter called “A Rugger Blue.” De¬ 
sire to see more of F. B., a feeling in his own mind that 
something more was yet demanded of him than an intel¬ 
lectual acknowledgment of the ethical value of Chris¬ 
tianity, made him accept this invitation. 

He says that he learned during those wonderful days 
in Cambridge the way of believing in God. The word 
spiritual as applied to a human being, he came to see, 
implied a person through whom the divine spirit could 
work. He began from that point to understand what 
he calls “the intimate working of the philosophy of 
Jesus.” Before he could reasonably hope to be in some 
communion with the divine spirit, manifestly he must 
attune his moral being to that celestial tone. His par¬ 
ticular need, he felt, was for honesty, first with himself 
and then with others; a genuine willingness to share 
burdens and difficulties; a disposition to pray readily 
and continually, out of a sense of great need and in¬ 
expressible unworthiness; an increasing consideration for 
the feelings of other people, taking into account their 
desires, their needs, and their limitations; finally, a com¬ 
plete submission of himself to the supreme ideal of hu¬ 
man life, Christ Jesus, with an instant and rejoicing 


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readiness to make any sacrifice of himself and his for¬ 
tunes at the call of the least of those whom he could help. 

There came a moment at that house party when he 
made this submission of his will to the Will of God, 
when he decided that henceforth he would live in abso¬ 
lute singleness of mind, with no thought of self, with 
everything he had or possessed at the service of his Mas¬ 
ter, his soul hungering and thirsting for the perfection 
of God. 

In one of his letters to me, written before an even 
greater experience of spiritual power, he said: “There 
is much more I might say, but this will be enough just 
now. At every point we are called upon for sober think¬ 
ing, and for discipline and for earnestness. The fur¬ 
ther I go the more profoundly am I impressed with the 
significance of simplicity. All the greatest ideas and 
truths in the world are simple. The Bible is simple. 
The highest prayer one can make or know of is the sim¬ 
plest of all. The issues of morality are simple—purity, 
honesty, sincerity, discipline. Jesus led a simple life in 
a humble station. The argument ex contrarie (i.e. that 
that which is not simple is probably unsound) applies 
forcibly to ever so many things, e.g. philosophy, if not 
to everything. Comparisons are odious, but we learn 
in time to rely on some ultimate criterion.” 

Since those words were written he has paid a visit 
to the United States in company with F. B., and from 
F. B. and others I learn that he has exercised a very 
powerful influence among American undergraduates. I 
do not wonder, for he is a singularly taking person. 
Moreover, his spiritual growth is visible to the eyes of 



BEAU IDEAL 


113 


all his friends. One of them described to me that growth 
as “tremendous,” adding that Beau Ideal had gone in 
for “a most severe self-discipline,” that he had “abso¬ 
lutely given up no end of things,” that he was now 
“completely in the saddle,” and that he allows “nothing 
to stand in the way of helping other men.” All this I 
can well believe. The fire was there from the first. Such 
men, however long they may hold back from the dread¬ 
ful moment of an absolute decision, will go to the utter¬ 
most extreme of self-sacrifice when once they have 
escaped from the former things of their tyranny. 

It may be interesting to glance for a moment at the 
intellectual characteristics of his faith. He finds no 
difficulty in thinking of Jesus as “the propitiation for 
the sins of the whole world.” He finds the greatest help 
in thinking of Jesus as the one power by whom men 
come to God and as the one being before whom we could 
not do a shameful act. He is convinced that the Bible 
and prayer are essential to spiritual life. In his last 
letter written from America he tells me that he is enter¬ 
ing with others into “A First Century Christian Fellow¬ 
ship,” explaining that they wish to get back to the type 
of Christianity which was maintained by the Apostles— 
“We not only accept their beliefs, but are also decided 
to practice their methods.” 

He announces in detail the elemental beliefs of a First 
Century Christianity. He believes in: 

The possibility of immediate and continued fellowship 
with the Holy Spirit— guidance. 

The proclamation of a redemptive gospel— personal, 
social, and national salvation. 


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The possession of fullness of life —rebirth, and an ever- 
increasing power and wisdom. 

The propagation of their life by individuals to individuals 
—personal religion. 

Out of these beliefs proceeds the method of propaga¬ 
tion: 

Love for the sinner. 

Hatred of the sin. 

Fearless dealing with sin. 

The presentation of Christ as the cure for sin. 

The sharing and giving of self, with and for others. 

“We are more concerned,” he writes, “with testifying 
to real experiences, explicable only on the hypothesis 
that God’s power has brought them to pass, through 
Christ, than with teaching an abstract ethical doctrine.” 

From this it will be seen that there is a tendency in 
his mind not only to make large assumptions (that is 
characteristic of all practical people), but also perhaps 
to regard obstinate credulity as a virtue. He seems 
ready to take over from one particular version of the 
First Century any phrase or idea which that version 
associates with the apostles—not to take it over as 
poetry, or as an attempt of the Eastern mind to utter 
inexpressible mystery in the language of metaphor, but 
as an axiom in a mathematical system of thought. 

I remember that in one of his former letters, speaking 
of the commending simplicity of the Christian religion, 
he remarks that the question of Jesus, What think ye of 
Christ? is simplicity itself. One is obliged to say that it 
is quite impossible for a man who has made even a cur- 


BEAU IDEAL 


115 


sory study of the documents to believe that Jesus ever 
asked such a question; certainly it was never asked in 
that form. The word Christ was not known to Jesus, 
and was never applied by the Greeks to any human 
being until after His death. Again, it is a solitary 
question, remote from the whole character of the life of 
Jesus; a life, we may surely say, which never wasted a 
moment in metaphysical speculation. Not what a man 
thought about Him was the preoccupation of Jesus, but 
whether that man was doing the Will of God. “Suffer 
little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not; 
for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” 

The danger of enthusiasm in religion is a very definite 
record of history; but if we go more deeply into that 
matter we shall surely find that this danger was only 
great and perilous to the progress of civilisation when it 
took the form of enthusiasm for a particular answer 
to the question, What think ye of Christ? 

Enthusiasm for love, modesty, unselfish service, moral 
discipline, and spiritual excellence, and the character 
of Jesus, has contributed to the progress of civilisation 
nothing but good. A movement of personal religion in 
our own time may render priceless service to that diffi¬ 
cult progress, and to all the most enduring of human 
interests; but one must doubt whether such a movement 
can ever emerge into the main current of existence if 
its little streams are dammed by theological tests. 

I feel about Beau Ideal and those with whom he now 
appears to be associating himself that in their enthu¬ 
siasm for the liberation and power of spiritual life they 
are somewhat dangerously disposed to regard theologi- 


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cal objections to the Catholic religion as sins against 
the Holy Spirit, and to confuse an unquestioning credu¬ 
lity with the beautiful and ineffable virtue of aspiring 
faith. 

It is natural, of course, for an impetuous and grateful 
mind, which has suffered sharply in the furnace of temp¬ 
tation, to regard with immeasurable gratitude the per¬ 
son who has opened to it the door of escape; but upon 
each of us, surely, is laid the obligation most seriously 
to ask himself whether one can ever be morally justi¬ 
fied in taking over from another man, merely because he 
has helped us, a dogmatic theology (which we propose 
henceforth to make a religious test for those we would 
attempt to help) without a personal and very conscien¬ 
tious scrutiny. 


CHAPTER VII 


PRINCETON 

' I TIIS narrative illustrates one of those curious para- 
doxes which sooner or later confront every his¬ 
torian of religion who attempts to lay down hard and 
fast rules for spiritual experience. 

It is the story of a changed life with no red-letter 
day in its calendar. One finds no moment in its progress 
where a definite break was made consciously with the 
past. It tells of no crisis of emotion setting a term to 
illusion and opening the gates to illumination. It is as 
true a document of conversion as any to be found in the 
pages of The Varieties of Religious Experience , and yet 
it seems to question the familiar saying of William 
James that “the crisis of self-surrender has always been, 
and must always be, regarded as the vital turning-point 
of the religious life.” 

Perhaps such a story may be helpful and encourag¬ 
ing to those who have grown in spiritual happiness just 
as they have grown in intellectual happiness; it will not, 
I hope, minister in any way to the moral indecision of 
those who, needing it so conspicuously, shrink from the 
apparent ordeal of self-surrender. For the majority of 
men, one suspects, the crisis is essential. 

Until he was twenty years of age this agreeable 
American, who is now only twenty-five, made no acquaint- 

117 


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ance with dogmatic theology. He grew up in a home 
which took religion for granted. His father, a man of 
wealth, was firmly religious in the moral sense of that 
word; a lawyer, and a prominent citizen of his state, he 
stood for “clean politics,” for honest dealing in trade, 
and for the domestic virtues in family life. Both from 
this father and from his mother, who was also strongly 
religious in an ethical manner, the boy learned to regard 
a lie as cowardly and shameful, and to feel that there 
was something superior and honourable in straightfor¬ 
wardness. The other member of the family was a sister, 
a little older than himself, very charming and sympa¬ 
thetic, of a natural refinement, and with an inclination 
to the deeper things of religious life. 

The family was exclusive to an extreme degree. This 
exclusiveness w T as not dictated by social considerations, 
but by a love of privacy and quiet. The father was 
a cultivated man with a fine library. He loved reading, 
and found his chief intellectual happiness in history and 
biography. He encouraged his son to read the best 
order of books. “Never read trash,” was one of his con¬ 
stant injunctions. He conveyed the impression that 
the mind could be soiled by contact with the second-rate. 

There w r as no feeling for art in the family. Music 
had no place in it; painting awoke no interest. The 
happiness of the household was complete, and felt no 
need for these things. Discussion never occurred at the 
table. The mind of the family was agreed upon every¬ 
thing. Occasionally the father would speak with con¬ 
tempt of a shady politician, or express himself strongly 
on the behaviour of a statesman or a newspaper; but there 
was never anything in the nature of debate or discussion. 

The son was sent to a Quaker school because it was 


PRINCETON 


119 


the best in the town. Perhaps he acquired at that school 
something of the Quaker spirit. One sees in his hand¬ 
some face a certain austerity of the spirit, and feels in 
his manner an almost preternatural gravity of mind. 
He is extraordinarily self-possessed, but without the 
least trace—on the contrary, indeed—of self-satisfac¬ 
tion or loudness of mind. The voice is low, the dark eyes 
are solemn, the expression of the face is impassive. He 
makes much the same impression on one, even in full 
daylight, as is made by a stranger speaking from the 
shadows of a large and curtained room which is lighted 
by a sleeping fire. It is as if he dwells far back in the 
recesses of his mind, so far back, at any rate, that the 
world can never steal his quiet or soil his peace. 

At seventeen years of age he proceeded to Princeton 
University. There was no shock of any kind in this first 
acquaintance with the world. He was happy in making 
a friend of Richard Cleveland, son of President Cleve¬ 
land, for this Richard was a social reformer very un¬ 
likely to get into wrong sets. The two young men re¬ 
garded one aspect of Varsity life with great contempt. 
There are no colleges in Princeton; only dormitories. 
In order to get something of the feeling of college life, 
the undergraduates form clubs, chiefly for eating pur¬ 
poses, and these clubs divide themselves into clubs with 
luxurious buildings, suitable for the rich and the dis¬ 
tinguished, and hugger-mugger clubs, suitable for the 
poor student. 

Richard Cleveland and the man of whom I am writing 
regarded this state of things as vulgar and bad. Such 
a division, they said, set up false standards. The busi¬ 
ness of a University is to mix all sorts and conditions of 



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men together; to unify, not to divide; certainly not to 
exalt wealth as something higher than genius or poverty. 
Moreover, a certain amount of drinking and gambling 
went on in the luxurious clubs; the moral influence was 
decidedly not good. Of one mind on this subject, and 
being prominent men in that year, they opposed them¬ 
selves to the tradition. Out of a class of three hundred, 
they enlisted a hundred men who pledged themselves not 
to join the expensive and aristocratic clubs. 

It must not be thought that this social activity 
created in the mind of our austere undergraduate a desire 
for public life. It is important to know that he re¬ 
mained aloof from personal friendships, and was inti¬ 
mate with no one. His influence was felt in the Univer¬ 
sity with no exertion on his part. He found himself 
elected to offices he had never sought; before he quite 
realised what had happened he discovered himself in a 
position of some moral responsibility. Still, he remained 
the quiet, serious, self-contained, and reserved student, 
making no friends, seeking no acquaintances, inviting no 
confidences. 

On his vacations he listened to his sister’s account 
of religious activity at the college in which she was dis¬ 
tinguishing herself. He was interested, felt that it was 
the right thing for her to be interested in such work, but 
there the matter ended. 

When he returned to Princeton, he found himself di¬ 
recting a movement half social and half religious—a 
movement to get University men interested in boys’ clubs 
and summer camps. At one of these summer camps he 
made the acquaintance of a bright and intelligent news- 


PRINCETON 


121 


boy, who began to talk to him more and more seriously 
about religion, until one day he suddenly blurted out 
a confession and asked his rich young friend for advice. 
The undergraduate recommended cold baths, no loung¬ 
ing about, brisk habits of mind and body. Some months 
afterwards the boy drew him on one side, and said that 
this plan did not work, asking if there was nothing else 
to be tried. 

The fact that he really had nothing else to advise 
rather preyed on the undergraduate’s mind. He began 
to pay some attention to the question of personal re¬ 
ligion. He heard about the work which F. B. was doing 
in some of the Universities. Then he met F. B. and was 
invited to attend a little Retreat of men interested in 
personal religion. He was disappointed at first in F. B. 
A temperamental reticence held him back for some time 
from joining this Retreat. But in the end he was per¬ 
suaded to go, and he went with a thoroughly uncom¬ 
fortable feeling, convinced that he would be a fish out 
of water. 

He said to me, “I have never had any moral struggle. 
I have never been aware of any problems in myself. I 
could always get along without outside help. Religion 
only interested me when I came to see how madly other 
men needed it to save themselves from going on the 
rocks. I learned as I went along that there are such 
things as temptations. Happily for me, I was alto¬ 
gether unaware of such temptations; my tastes, my 
temperament, my home-life, made certain things ugly 
and dislikable to me; but other men, I discovered, did 
not see those things in the same light. Among the men 
who w r ent to F. B.’s Retreat were some whom I knew 


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fairly well, and knew to be doing no good. I saw these 
men changed. It was the sudden and complete change in 
these men, under E. B.’s influence, which made an effect 
upon my mind. It was impossible not to be impressed. 
I never tackled anyone myself, and nobody tackled me; 
but I saw something of this tackling, and I saw quite 
clearly its extraordinary effect. Still I felt reluctant to 
take up any work of that nature. It was good for other 
men, but not for me. I had no bias that way, no gift for 
such work. My whole temperament was opposed to it.” 

Soon after this a youngish man came to the Univer¬ 
sity as Secretary of the Christian Association. He had 
been changed by F. B. He talked to my friend, told him 
that he too had been just as repelled by F. B., and then 
proceeded to relate what F. B. had done for him. The 
happiness of this man, the tremendous drive of his per¬ 
sonality, his reality, his conviction that men could be 
saved from sin by no other method, made a marked im¬ 
pression on my friend’s mind. 

Still, no decision was taken. 

A little later there were religious conferences. F. 
B.’s spirit, he says, had prepared their atmosphere. It 
was a friendly, hopeful, and perfectly natural atmos¬ 
phere. The absence of anything official or sacerdotal 
struck him agreeably. Men of all sorts were there— 
scholars and athletes—and all of them talked in their 
natural voices, wore ordinary clothes, and behaved as if 
they were debating a political question. He found him¬ 
self growing more and more convinced that F. B. was 
right. He had no personal interview. He was simply 
one of a group. F. B.’s remarks were made to the whole 
group, never to him in particular. But gradually, pro¬ 
foundly, imperceptibly, the change was taking place. 



PRINCETON 


ns 


Day by day he became more certain. Day by day he 
saw what he was going to do. There was no crisis; no 
moment in which he decided; no moment in which re¬ 
ligion suddenly became real. Everything in the old 
life shaded off into the new life forming within him. 
God did not suddenly cease to be a name and suddenly 
become a Person. It was all like the coming of a dawn 
—a gradual emergence from darkness to twilight, from 
twilight to day. 

But the daylight was there, and he saw visibly what 
was before him. An only son, very expensively educated, 
who goes to a proud father and announces that he wishes 
to devote his life to the poverty and service of religion 
cannot be sure of congratulation. But this announce¬ 
ment had to be made. So great now was the gradual 
and imperceptible change in his soul that he could con¬ 
template no other life. To give all he possessed to the 
work of helping men was now his destiny. 

“There was no real opposition in my family,” he told 
me. “My sister was back in the home, engaged in re¬ 
ligious work, and the atmosphere was perhaps changed 
by her work. In any case, my father was extremely kind 
and understanding. My mother expressed a strong feel¬ 
ing that the step I contemplated might not be wise, but 
she was quite affectionate. Everything seemed to be 
made easy for me. I took up the work, and I am hap¬ 
pier than I have ever been before. It has opened to me a 
door to one of the greatest things in life—friendship.” 

He spoke of this great thing with his usual self-mas¬ 
tery, and yet it was impossible not to realise an enthu¬ 
siasm in the measured words. He had no glowing 
language for the mystical experiences of the religious life, 
and no glowing words either for the wonderful delight 



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of human friendship; but he spoke of this high human 
pleasure with a certain ring in his voice which I never, 
caught when he was speaking of other subjects. 

He said, “I had no idea that friendship was such a 
beautiful thing. I came late to it, because our family 
kept so much to itself, and because by nature I was very 
reserved as a boy. We never seemed to meet other 
people. Certainly I never played with other children. 
I met boys of my own age at school, but only at school; 
they never came back to our house. I never knew them. 
In a sense I had never known anybody at all. But this 
work of personal religion brings friendship into a man’s 
life in its highest conceivable form. I am now so rich in 
friends that I smile when people speak to me of the self- 
sacrifice in religion. The life a man lays down in this 
matter is not a very desirable thing. The life he takes 
up again is full of the deepest possible happiness. One 
finds that it is very difficult to help another man until 
one really cares for him, and directly one cares for an¬ 
other man not only is it easy to help him, but you get 
this most beautiful thing of friendship—friendship that 
counts no cost in its longing to be of service. I doubt 
if many people who live entirely without religion have 
any idea of what friendship is—true human friendship.” 

He makes one think of Bacon’s great saying, “no man 
that imparteth his joys to his friend, but he joyeth the 
more; and no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend, 
but he grieveth the less.” 

This work has not only brought him a pleasure of 
which he had no experience, but a new knowledge of 
which he had never dreamed. 


PRINCETON 


125 


“I am astounded,” he said to me, “by the moral chaos 
in men’s lives. Difficulties about which I knew nothing 
present themselves now at every turn. Sin, I discover, 
plays an unimaginably great part in human life. Men 
who might be of service to a nation, and who might 
enjoy peace of mind and a life of the highest happiness, 
are frustrated by inclinations which they find themselves 
powerless to resist, even when they see clearly that they 
are disastrous. I used to think that a man went to the 
bad because he liked going to the bad. It always seemed 
to me that men who did things which most decent men 
regard as unworthy or even contemptible, did those 
things because they found pleasure in them. Now I 
know that many of these men, at any rate at the begin¬ 
ning of their careers, do these things against their own 
judgment, even against their own will. Something with¬ 
in them drives them on. They are suddenly attacked by 
irresistible power. They describe themselves as being 
forced, driven, or hurled into ways which they hate. All 
this was at one time quite unintelligible to me. I never 
realised that there is a struggle in the soul. Now I 
know that any man whose personality is divided must 
always live at the sport of treacherous inclinations.” 

He also said to me: “I do not at all think that sex 
difficulties are the chief battle-ground of youth. I re¬ 
gard those difficulties as much the same as lethargy, 
pride, idleness, coldness, meanness, selfishness. It is even 
harder sometimes to break down a man’s conceit or 
selfishness than to strengthen another man against 
sensual weakness. All sin has its roots in selfishness. 
Chaos is inseparable from selfishness.” 

He spoke to me also of his view concerning the future 
of religion in the struggle of man’s soul. 


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“I have learned,” he said, “from this work of personal 
religion to distrust organisation and to see a quite extra¬ 
ordinary power in the leaven of personality. No doubt 
organisation of some kind will long continue, and will 
be useful; but I feel confident that the future belongs 
to personal religion, by which I mean the unofficial, 
the unprofessional, and the uninstitutional influence 
of one man on another. I am quite sure human¬ 
ity must be saved man by man, not in droves and herds. 
I doubt if anyone can profoundly help another until he 
cares for him as a friend. And until intercourse is abso¬ 
lutely intimate how can one soul understand another 
soul—understand it in such a manner as to render 
help?” 

He told me of the change which is now going on in 
the Universities of America. There is a new seriousness 
among undergraduates, an increasing sense of responsi¬ 
bility, a visible movement towards spiritual life. All 
this is entirely due to personal religion. It is the work 
of a few men like F. B. It has received no impetus from 
official quarters. Swiftly, as if some mysterious power 
were at work, the spirit spreads from University to 
University, and religion becomes a real thing, a thing of 
infinite moment to the individual, of enormous impor¬ 
tance to the future of the human race. 

Directly, he says, a man feels that religion is a real 
power in human life, not merely a subject for theologi¬ 
cal discussion, he becomes interested in it. And directly 
he discovers that it can work a miracle in his own soul 
he seeks to understand it. A few men with this wonder¬ 
ful leaven of personality could change the world. 


CHAPTER VIII 


A YOUNG SOLDIER 

/^NE of the guests at the house-party to which I re- 
ferred in my introduction was pointed out to me as 
a man who had distinguished himself in the war by nota¬ 
ble courage. He looked a mere boy—one of those fresh¬ 
skinned, fair-haired, urchin-like striplings whose faces 
flush with a grinning self-consciousness when they find 
themselves objects of observation. 

He was tall and slight, with an inclination to stoop his 
head. But for the sadness of his voice, which is rather 
deep in note, and the gravity of his words in discussion, 
one would think of him as a sly schoolboy always on the 
alert to pull somebody’s leg or to work off a pun. So 
much suppressed laughter, so much restrained gaiety, 
so much controlled roguishness, it would be difficult to 
find in the face of the most frivolous-minded tormentor 
of a schoolmaster. It was difficult for me to think of 
this jolly-looking youth as a soldier; more difficult to 
believe that he had passed through a religious crisis. 

He told me that his father, who was a well-known man 
in English public life, died when he was eight years of 
age. “Yet,” he said, “my impression of him is quite 
clear; his personality was unforgettable.” As for his 

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mother, who is still alive, he declared that she is a mother 
beyond all praise. 

In a home so enviable as this, with one brother as a 
companion, M. grew up to boyhood, not merely shielded 
from all coarse influences which might throw miserable 
shadows across the radiance of a child’s natural inno¬ 
cence, but encouraged to find his highest delight in occu¬ 
pations wholesome both for mind and body. The books 
he read were calculated to develop refinement of spirit; 
the games he played were calculated to develop his cour¬ 
age and his muscles. When he went to a preparatory^ 
school he was as good a specimen of healthy, hearty, 
clean-minded, and intelligent English boyhood as any 
father could wish to see. 

Unhappily for his development, there was a master 
at this school who was tormented by a devil of lust, and 
whose evil and furtive spirit corrupted the whole school. 
The boy learned vice at the hands of one who was paid 
to teach him virtue. He appears to have slipped into 
bad habits, as so many small boys do, with no apprehen¬ 
sion at all of their consequences, physical or moral. 
Nevertheless he was not without knowledge that what he 
did was wrong, that it was something to be done out of 
sight, that it was an act of which he felt ashamed. It 
was with a feeling of relief that he found himself in a 
public school, where the moral tone was healthier and 
where he came under the stimulating influences of “some 
ripping masters.” 

Dogged by the vice he had learned at his first school, 
M. made a gallant fight for his self-respect, and gradu¬ 
ally obtained a fair mastery over dangerous dispositions. 
He did well in games and well in school. He began to 
enjoy himself with the happiness of one who feels that 


A YOUNG SOLDIER 


129 


things are straightening out, that the path before him 
leads to success, and that success can be gained with 
comparative ease. He won a scholarship for Oxford, 
and went up to the University with an appetite for all 
the best things which life offers at its charming threshold 
to the happiest order of manhood—that order of man¬ 
hood which finds as superlative a pleasure in the acquisi¬ 
tion of knowledge as in an increasing skill in difficult 
games. 

One term of great happiness passed away, and then 
came the European war, claiming him as a soldier of 
England. From others I learn that he rose quickly to 
the rank of captain, that he was distinguished through¬ 
out his service for an unquailing courage and a singu¬ 
larly gentle regard for the welfare of his men, and that 
he won enviable distinctions in the great Battle of the 
Somme, falling at last to an attack of poison-gas. 

When he recovered from this rather desperate afflic¬ 
tion he was sent back to Oxford. The war had weak¬ 
ened in him his enthusiasm for scholarship, and had 
heightened in him his passion for games. He found an 
extraordinary delight in physical fitness. As if war 
had whetted his appetite for danger, he loved chiefly 
those games which involved risk of limb. When he could 
not play such games he rode about the country on a 
motor-cycle, loving speed for itself and almost seeking 
those “narrow squeaks” which make the elderly specta¬ 
tor hold his breath. 

It was in the rush of this athletic period, when his 
body was at its fittest and his mind freest from anxiety, 
that sexual trouble began once more to invade. But 
Oxford provided for him at this time something of an 
aid in his distress. He discovered the pleasure of friend- 



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ship. There were rooms in which he was always wel¬ 
come; there were delightful men always willing to talk. 
Among these men it was natural to discuss religion, and 
religion came back to his mind, consecrated by the mem¬ 
ory of his father, and sacred with the thought of his 
mother, to help him in the loneliness of his conflict. But 
the stir of sex in his blood was not to be stilled, and 
though he might again and again overthrow that power¬ 
ful motion in his whole being, yet the thing was there, 
haunting him, irking him, gnawing at his self-respect, 
shadowing his natural happiness. 

In one of his discussions with a friend he heard for 
the first time of F. B., and was curious rather than in¬ 
terested by what he heard. At any rate he made no 
effort to see F. B., and continued to fight his battle in 
his own way. Soon after this he was badly broken in 
a Rugger smash, and was carted off to hospital with 
more injuries to his bones than the Great War had been 
able to inflict. 

One day, lying in his bed at this hospital, a stranger 

came to see him. It was F. B. F. B. had been told by 

\ 

one of M.’s friends that there was a man in hospital who 
might be glad, he rather thought, to have a talk with 
him. Accordingly F. B., brisk, smiling, and quietly 
cheerful, presented himself at the bedside of football’s 
victim. 

“He made no impression upon me,” said M., “neither 
one way nor the other. It never occurred to me to think 
of him as an out-of-the-way sort of person. He seemed 
perfectly natural, not particularly interesting, and cer¬ 
tainly not in the least striking. But after he had left 
me I was conscious of a very curious feeling about him. 
I wanted to see him again. It wasn’t a case of wanting 


A YOUNG SOLDIER 


131 


to see a person one likes, or a person who has interested 
one by his ideas, but wanting to see a man who had made 
no other impression except this curious and inexplicable 
impression that one did very much want to see him 
again.” 

The next time F. B. came to M.’s bedside he made 
another impression. He was still an average person, 
still a person who was not in the least dramatic or even 
notable, yet he left behind him in M.’s mind the distinct 
sensation that he could help him. “I couldn’t explain to 
myself why I had this feeling,” M. told me; “I tried to 
reason the thing out, but couldn’t see the ghost of an 
explanation. We had said nothing of a serious nature. 
There was no sense of intimacy. I was still conscious of 
his difference as a Yankee. And yet there it was; I 
could not shake out of my mind the notion that this un¬ 
remarkable man could help me to straighten things out 
as no other man had yet done.” 

F. B.’s account of the matter is as follows: “One of 
his friends had spoken to me about him. He mentioned 
no trouble, but said that M. was a man he’d like me to 
meet. He spoke of his services in the war, told me about 
his fame as a Rugger player, said he was altogether a 
very fine fellow, and then mentioned that he was lying 
in the hospital, cracked up pretty badly. I knew I had to 
see this man. I knew, too, directly I saw him what his 
trouble was. We talked of just ordinary things. I 
didn’t bother to know whether he liked me or not; all 
I knew was that for certain he would one day ask me 
to help him. 

“That day came. He didn’t find it easy to tell me the 
whole story. He got as far, with great difficulty, as 


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telling me that he wasn’t as happy as he wanted to be, 
and that he thought I might possibly be able to help 
him. I helped him right there, at that very moment. 
I helped him by telling him what his trouble was. It 
hit him like a blow from a hammer. After that it was 
easy for him, easy for me, easy for God. He’s one of 
the finest fellows living, brave as a lion, yet shy as a 
girl. A beautiful nature—a real man with all the deli¬ 
cacy of a woman. 

“Directly the trouble was out in the open he really 
hated it. With this hatred was a longing for all that a 
good man means by the Name of God. There was no 
wrestle, no struggle. He came to himself in a moment. 
Already he has done remarkable work, and when he has 
taken his degree as a doctor he will use his life entirely 
for God.” 

M. tells me that one of the greatest things F. B. did 
for him was freeing his mind for discussing this moral 
trouble with other men. An enormous change came into 
his life directly the sense of secret shame was dissipated. 
The evil lost its power. He found himself possessed of 
an altogether new strength. He was conscious of an 
altogether new liberty. 

To complete the happiness of his freedom from a 
noxious obsession he found that he could help other men 
to get their various temptations into the open, and that 
once in the open it was easy for them—most of them, 
at any rate—to realise the need for hating their sins 
before they could expect answers to their prayers. 

I asked him to tell me what his opinion was of the 
morals of men at the Universities. He replied that, so far 
as his experience went, the present generation of young 




A YOUNG SOLDIER 


133 


men is a healthy one. There is no “smuttiness” among 
them. The vast majority want to conquer their bad 
habits. It would be a very gross perversion of the truth 
to think of these young men as accepting vice as the 
natural order of things. They don’t narrate their ad¬ 
ventures. They don’t compare their experiences. They 
don’t talk about these matters; certainly those who do 
don’t talk flippantly. There is a terrible struggle going 
on. It is a silent struggle. There are many defeats in 
that struggle, but no surrender on the part of the aver¬ 
age man. Sport helps them more than orthodox religion, 
for orthodox religion seems to ignore this tremendous 
battlefield of youth; at any rate, it has nothing to offer 
which is recognised by the fighters as a help. What does 
help, what does enable most men to get the victory, is 
the personal religion inculcated by F. B. And there is 
far more of this work going on than the dons know. It 
is a part of the friendship of University life, widening 
its influence with every term. 

One of the stories he told me, very modestly, of his 
own efforts to help other men is well worth telling here. 
In none of these stories (need I assert it of so gallant 
and gentle a man?) was there the least suggestion of 
exalting his own power over other lives. His sole object 
in telling them was to show me how the drive of sympa¬ 
thy can help a man who rather shrinks from such work 
to change the lives of others. His great contention is 
that F. B. has discovered for him the central truth of 
spiritual life, the pearl of great price, and that this 
truth is destined to save the soul of the world. He is 
quite sure about that. The soul can definitely deal 
direct with God. 


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Among his fellow medical students he came across a 
man who had been with him at his public school. They 
renewed the friendship of those days, found that they had 
been fighting together in France without knowing it, 
and gradually entered into an intimate relationship. 

This friend of schooldays told M. that when he went 
out to France he was engaged to be married. The bru¬ 
tality of the war atmosphere, with its manifold depres¬ 
sions and its inescapable temptations, preyed upon his 
moral energy, chafing him, but could not impair his 
loyalty to the girl in England. For two years of con¬ 
stant danger and surrounding bestiality he kept faith 
with idealism. He was as true as steel. Then he re¬ 
turned from the war to find that this girl had formed 
another attachment and wished to throw him over. 

In the bitterness of his grief and the irony of his dis¬ 
illusion he went to the dogs. Alone in London, hating 
his solitude, longing for sympathy, and tortured by the 
thought that he had been true to a woman in vain, he 
sought to forget his troubles in the society of harlots. 
Revulsion overcame him after every one of these visits, a 
revulsion bitter as gall, but again and again he went 
back, driven by an intolerable sense of loneliness. 
“Many men,” he told M., “go to these poor girls simply 
for companionship. They are the kindest people in Lon¬ 
don to the friendless man eating his heart out in lodg¬ 
ings.” 

The manner in which M. has been able to help this 
particular person is simply by giving him a sense of 
loyalty to his own higher nature and by providing him 
with an altogether more abiding companionship. But 
the bitterness of the man’s heart is not yet wholly gone, 
and the sense of the divine companionship is not yet 


A YOUNG SOLDIER 


135 


firmly established. Still is he overtaken from time to 
time by an unbearable feeling of solitude and forlorn¬ 
ness ; but now, instead of seeking a cure for that ill 
where no cure is to be found, he comes to M., and to M. 
confesses his feebleness. “We are helping each other,” 
is M.’s account of the matter. 

No man could be freer than M. from that insufferable 
arrogance, or self-satisfaction, which disfigures so 
many people who feel themselves to be called by God to 
the service of converting other men. He speaks with 
quiet reverence, but an extreme diffidence, of his belief 
that his power to help other men is increasing, and he 
looks forward to the day when as a doctor in some for¬ 
eign Christian mission he may be able to exert that 
power with far greater effect. The power is there. He 
has no doubt about that. The ability to use it must be 
determined by his own response to its unaltering condi¬ 
tions. 

He seems to me to be studying the laws of the spiritual 
world as the man of science studies the laws of the physi¬ 
cal world. He is rightly making experiments with his 
soul. But below the inquiring mind is a spirit which 
believes unquestionably and with deep gladness in the 
existence of a God who is desirous of communicating 
Himself to His creature; and in the mind itself, that 
mind which inquires and investigates, is the clear know¬ 
ledge that hatred of sin, and a clean bill from all forms 
of selfishness, must go before that craving desire for 
moral wisdom which establishes connection with the 
Eternal Righteousness. He does not announce himself 
as a discoverer, but he is certainly a traveller. 

The moral and spiritual differences separating such 


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men as this charming young person from the offensive 
type of evangelical who went about in the eighties ask¬ 
ing everyone whom he encountered, “Are you saved?” 
seem to me as great as the moral and spiritual differ¬ 
ences which separate the writings of Plato from the 
writings of Ibsen, or the life of John Hampden from the 
life of Rousseau. It is an entirely new type. It is a 
phenomenon in religious experience. With all the earn¬ 
estness and unflinching realism of the older type of 
evangelicalism there is a delicacy, a modesty, a sweet¬ 
ness, and a tolerance in this new protagonist of personal 
religion which renders him, I think, a force of great 
hope for the future. 


CHAPTER IX 


THE VIRGINIAN 

If ERE, to wind up these brief narratives, is the story of 
* * a blithe and hard-hitting spirit whose blood may 
well have descended to him from those Englishmen, “the 
flower and force of a kingdom,” as Sir John Smyth de¬ 
scribed them to Lord Burghley in the sixteenth century, 
who then fought in Flanders and who “went voluntary 
to serve of a gaiety and joyalty of mind.” 

The vigour of the man, the sheer delight he gets out 
of his struggle, the uncompromising character of his 
attack, and the warm friendliness of his nature, should 
bring him close enough to the people in England who 
still acknowledge the ancient tradition of Elizabethan 
adventure. The phrase used of F. W. Robertson may 
well be used of him. He is a troubadour of God. 

He was born in a fox-hunting country, beautiful with 
the softness and tenderness of our English shires, with 
far views from the hilltops over Chesapeake Bay to the 
rim of the Atlantic. His father owned a considerable 
estate, and the boy grew up among many negro servants, 
innumerable animals, and a regular Zoo of pets. There 
was a certain sense of lordship in his mind. He liked 
his own way, felt himself irritated by check, stung by 

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correction, and incapable of seeing life from any point 
of view but his own. 

During his boyhood the central figure of the family 
life was a venerable snow-capped grandmother, more 
Victorian than Victoria herself, mildly morbid about a 
long-deceased husband, evangelical, rigid concerning the 
proprieties, her austere and commanding face sternly 
set against invading vulgarity, but copious and anec¬ 
dotal, with an interest in the living world, albeit an 
interest chiefly anxious concerning its future. 

Under the shadow of this impressive relic of a van¬ 
ished antiquity the soul of the mutinous boy was chilled 
into some semblance of reverence, coming from his ponies 
and dogs into her presence with the sense of entering 
another world, breathing a different climate, speaking an 
unnatural language. 

It was only when he was alone with his mother that he 
felt stirrings within him of tenderness and graciousness. 
He told me that she was “always interested in what I 
was doing, but never solicitous”—a telling phrase good 
for all mothers to lodge in their hearts. His mother 
never gave him the feeling that he was being watched; 
he could talk to her without the paralysing fear that 
she was listening only in order to correct; a beautiful 
frankness, a real interest in his affairs, a quick willing¬ 
ness to help him on his own level, characterised her 
attitude; and when he wished to be alone she understood 
and withdrew to other occupations. 

From this mother he learned to think of a transcend¬ 
ent Being who had created the heavens and the earth, 
and of His Son Jesus, who had lived among men, who 
had taught them how to live, and who had been cruelly 
put to death by wicked enemies. 


THE VIRGINIAN 


139 


This teaching was associated in his mind with the 
different activities which marked one day in the week, 
when he had to be more careful in his use of soap and 
flannel, when his best suit was put out for him, and when 
he went in company with his parents to a church carry¬ 
ing on the Anglican tradition. There, too, he found the 
secular importance of his father duly acknowledged, for 
his father was one of the “patrons” of that church, and 
was ever received with a certain deference by the other 
officials. 

What the boy thought of God and Christ, of Heaven 
and Hell, of Prayers and Hymns, we do not know; for 
his consciousness did not become alert in such matters 
till he was approaching the age of fourteen. It woke 
suddenly to awareness, and also to enthusiasm, in rather 
a strange way. There came to that church one Sunday 
a very old clergyman who had spent long years of his 
life as a missionary to the mountaineers in the Par 
South. Such stories did he tell in his sermon, stories of 
pathos and heroism, stories of difficulties and endurance, 
stories of violent men broken down by the beauty of 
Christ, and bad men restored to goodness and happiness 
by the power of Christ, that the little boy in the big 
pew resolved then and there that he too would be a mis¬ 
sionary. 

The strange feature in this idea is its tenacity. It did 
not fly in at one door of his soul and out at the other, 
like Bede’s sparrow; it stayed there, worked there, be¬ 
came the master-thought of his mind. When he was in 
the fields, or among his animals, or talking to the 
negroes, this idea went to sleep; but when he came to 
lie down in his bed at night it awoke with a freshness that 
held his thoughts. He began to read the Bible with a 


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boy’s earnest attentiveness, to say his prayers with no 
mere formal sense of fulfilling a duty, to cultivate an 
interest in the history of the Church. Nevertheless, he 
still remained the proud and self-willed little boy of the 
years before this dream. 

Soon after the visit of the missionary he was packed 
off to a “Church School,” which is an American equiva¬ 
lent for the English public school, and his clerical ambi¬ 
tion was not daunted by the visible and even scandalous 
enmity which existed between the clergymen who taught 
him his lessons, preached to him in church about the 
gospel, and administered to him the sacrament of Holy 
Communion. These men hated each other quite openly, 
and did not hide that ugly fact, in which they gloried, 
from the boys under their care. 

He says that the religious studies of this school were 
“lifeless, sapless,” but gladly acknowledges that the tone 
was good, and says that his spiritual life was helped in 
the fields and by the sea. There was not a boy in the 
school who had come from a bad home. 

From this school he proceeded to one of the best Uni¬ 
versities of America, and soon became a figure in its 
most fashionable club (a form of college), ending up as 
a member of its Senior Council, and the President of 
the most distinguished Society in the University. He 
was of a nature to make an impression. 

The war in Europe brought him in 1915 to the British 
Islands with a group of American University men who 
had volunteered to serve with the Y. M. C. A. He 
worked like a nigger, but confesses that if he touched one 
man that summer it was all he did, and that man not 
vitally. 

His next spiritual adventure was in China, where his 


THE VIRGINIAN 


141 


University maintains an important college. He says 
he was astonished by the wonderful machine he found in 
China, but more astonished by the fact that it did 
nothing—“machinery, but no motion.” He was told by 
all the workers that he was doing wonderful things, but 
he knew very well that he was doing nothing. The busi¬ 
ness school, the gymnasium, the library, the classes, the 
social work—all these were crowded by young China¬ 
men; but what came of them? When Ruskin was told 
that a submarine cable had been laid between England 
and India he asked, “What messages will it convey?” 

One day there came to this Chinese city the Surgeon 
of Souls, with a group of men devoted to the work of 
personal religion. He was pointed out to the Virginian 
in this fashion: “There goes a man who is doing what 
these missionaries and Christian workers are talking 
about.” The Virginian took a good look at him and did 
not like him. He thought him crude. The attitude of 
the aristocratic University towards the college where 
F. B. had begun to work was one of supercilious con¬ 
tempt. The Virginian shared that contempt. 

But interest in F. B. increased, and the Virginian 
found himself listening to stories about him. Presently 
he was making F. B.’s acquaintance, and found him, 
rather condescendingly perhaps, a person worth know¬ 
ing. One day he drew F. B. aside and asked him if he 
would tackle a certain young Chinaman in whom he was 
interested. F. B. replied, “That’s your job. If you 
haven’t anything to give him by now you ought to!” 
The Virginian was mad. He went away, not sorrow¬ 
fully, but in a towering rage. 

When this temper evaporated he faced the truth of F. 
B.’s bitter taunt. Nothing to give! Was that really 


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the truth? If so, how serious, how impossible, his posi¬ 
tion. He fought with himself. Was he to give up his 
hope of helping men? Would it always be that he had 
nothing to give? The question drove him to F. B. 

“One day,” he tells me, “we got to business. I told 
him, in spite of myself, my temptations and my sins. 
They came out almost before I knew it. For the first 
time they were outside myself, in words, words that 
startled and shamed. He understood. We got it all 
into the open. The position became absolutely clear. 
I saw at once what was keeping me from power. There 
was no overflow, because there was no inflow, and no in¬ 
flow because sin was walling out the power of God. I 
tried to bring up intellectual difficulties. He refused 
to discuss them, would not even glance at them. This 
may seem to some—it didn’t to me—a source of weak¬ 
ness ; it gives the impression that he cares nothing for 
intellectual integrity. The truth is the man is a born 
mystic. Get him alone and you realise this at once. 
And you realise also the truth of what William James 
says, that we have got to accept the experience of the 
mystic as valid experience. F. B. made a tremendous 
impression on me. His simple insistence on the power 
of sin to wall out any vital consciousness of God was 
irresistible. He showed me, quite mercilessly, my spirit¬ 
ual impotence in the lives of other men. He laid it all 
bare to me, naked in broad daylight, my spiritual im¬ 
potence. What good was I? Let a man ask himself 
that question. It’s a searcher.” 

That night the Virginian tried to pray, but felt that 
his prayer was useless. He knew that he was at a turn¬ 
ing-point. Either he would go back to America and sur¬ 
render to the world, or—. The point that frightened 



THE VIRGINIAN 


143 


him was this: If he took the plunge it might mean, not 
a decorative interest in religion, not the patronising 
association of a rich young man with a University 
scheme of social welfare, but the mission-field for life* 
Was he ready for that? To be a parson? 

He walked about his room. “My sins,” he said, “rose 
up before me straight as tombstones. If I took this 
plunge it meant a clearing up all along the line. It 
meant confession. It meant a break with all that had 
gone before—a new life. Then I saw that this was a 
matter of the will not of the intellect. I faced that 
knowledge for several moments. My will! Was I will¬ 
ing to do this thing, or was I not willing? A strange 
thought, annihilating in its effect—my little pygmy will 
opposed to the Will of God, my little pride sniffing at the 
Universe, my heart dead cold in the Presence of the Al¬ 
mighty! Without a scrap of emotion, but with what 
I can only call a great heave of my will, I knelt down 
to make my submission, to give myself, without reserva¬ 
tion, to God. Usually this moment costs something in 
nervous energy, and results in emotional excitation. I 
experienced nothing of the kind. I was sensible only of 
calm, of a feeling that something needful and right had 
been done. I felt very little at the time. I simply real¬ 
ised that I had jumped a fence at which I had long 
balked. There was no breaking in of light upon me, nor 
anything unusual. After the prayer, which tore away 
a wall of my own erection—the wall of unwillingness to 
face God’s Will fully—I prayed again, but without 
ecstasy. I rose from that prayer hoping that I might 
be used to help others, and feeling that I had done what 
was required of me. But I was not to be left only with 
that feeling. As I lay in bed there came to me a dis- 



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tinct Voice, and that Voice said, There is no work of 
Mine to do for him who is not wholly Mine. I cannot 
tell you the effect of those words. They were no words 
of mine. They were different from all other words I 
had ever heard. And they revealed to me what I believe 
to be the central truth of religion.” 

The change in the Virginian from that hour was visi¬ 
ble to all his friends. He became the impassioned cham¬ 
pion of personal religion. Gone for him was all hesitancy. 
Abandoned, too, was the attitude of a looker-on. 
He flung himself with a joyful enthusiasm into the work 
of helping men face to face, swept forward from all his 
former landmarks by the immediate success of his efforts. 
He told me that association with F. B. taught him “the 
absolute workability of the thing he talked about.” 
This was no question, remember, of dogma or of cere¬ 
monial rite. It was the human question. It was a case 
of drowning men saved from death. F. B. spoke of men 
who were “suffering hell,” or of men lost in a fog, or of 
men who were missing all the things that make life splen¬ 
did, and showed him those same men with shining eyes, 
glad voices, happy as the day is long. There they were 
before the Virginian’s eyes—miracles. Changed men! 
A wonderful thought; changed from darkness to light, 
from blindness to vision, from misery to happiness, from 
death to life, laughing in the joy of that change. 

What a power, to do these things! 

He exclaimed to me, “I hear people say that what 
men want is something quite human. Nonsense! What 
they want is something wholly and absolutely divine. 
The mistake lies in expressing this Divine Something in 
dark and mysterious language. The language must be 


THE VIRGINIAN 


145 


human. But the thing itself, the mysterious Power which 
changes life in a moment, that must be shown from the 
first as divine. I see it in this manner: In each one of 
us there is a vestige of the Christ. It is the light that 
lighteth every man. Until sin has blotted out from con¬ 
sciousness the knowledge of this light, every man feels 
that there is something within him higher than himself. 
I am certain this feeling exists in all men wdio are not 
dead in sin—the greatest of men of science and the most 
ragged and ignorant of down-and-outers. It is there 
in their souls, making for a sense of dualism, dividing 
their personality, distracting their unity. And I am 
equally convinced that when a man is acutely conscious 
of this division, and meditates on the best way of secur¬ 
ing inward peace, he naturally, instinctively, inevitably 
turns to Christ. This is my firm conviction. It is born 
of experience. The surrender, if it is to be made, is to 
Christ, to no one else. To Christ, the lover and saviour 
of men. This is my theology: God has left a part of 
Himself in each of us, and this divine part of our nature, 
in every moral crisis, recognises the historic Jesus and the 
Christ of experience as its necessary complement. Of 
course, the traditional, the ecclesiastical, the theological 
mind has obscured Him; but I am certain that where men 
are unprejudiced, where they are in dead earnest about 
getting right, where they want unity with the whole heart, 
the whole spirit, and the whole mind, they turn to Christ. 
Let me sum it all up in a few words. What changes life 
is, first, a sense of sin, a haunting knowledge that the 
habits of sin have got one in their deadly grip, second, 
an experience of the hilarity of Christianity really lived, 
and, third, the immense appeal of Christ’s challenge to 
make a new world.” 


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On no other subject is this fighting Virginian so glad 
to talk as the hilarity of the religious life. “The gay¬ 
est bunch of men I know,” he tells you, “is the group that 
swings round F. B. They are fellows who have found 
something worth finding. We never meet but what we 
have a good time. This is far from the professional 
mirth of certain sorts of religious people. It is the 
laughter of men who really know there is a way out in 
this world, and who are doing their best to make it 
known to others.” No defence for such happiness is 
necessary. It is a happiness that cannot be helped. Do 
men gather thorns of vines or thistles of fig-trees? As 
the sun shines so does the heart of a man conscious of 
unity with his Creator, conscious, too, of power to 
change human life, rejoice with a joy unknown to the 
victims of delusion and the slaves of sin. 

In this hilarity one sees the joy of a spirit set free 
from the contagion of the world’s slow stain, emanci¬ 
pated from all the petty conventions and parochial re¬ 
straints of that old, unhappy world, launched definitely 
on the radiant ocean of eternity. The world looks upon 
these men as “odd,” but it has no idea how odd it looks 
to them. What a dull world, what a sad world, what a 
blind world, and what a stupid, blundering world it must 
seem, in the eyes of men whose hearts know nothing ex¬ 
cept the bliss of conscious and unselfish union with God. 
The Virginian’s favourite saying of Christ is the challenge, 
“My doctrine is not Mine, but His that sent Me. If any 
man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, 
whether it be of God, or whether I speak of Myself.” 
He says that those who have experienced this mighty 
change do not speak of what they think or of what they 


THE VIRGINIAN 


147 


hope, but of what they know. That is the reward of 
a unified personality. 

Even after that night when he made his submission 
the Virginian has grown in this knowledge. He tells 
me that E. B. asked him in those early days to attend a 
private conference on the subject of personal religion, 
promising him that he should meet a wonderful group 
of men—“All F. B.’s geese are swans; it is partly his 
intense enthusiasm and belief in us which keeps us func¬ 
tioning!” When he got to his conference the Virginian 
was disappointed by what looked like a lot of quite 
ordinary folks. The wall arose once more between him 
and the souls of others. F. B., reading his thoughts, 
drew him aside, and whispered into his ear this question, 
“What would you have thought of the twelve apostles?” 

From that moment he learned not only to abandon 
a superior attitude towards others, and not only to sus¬ 
pect and examine the grounds of instinctive antipathy, 
but positively to look always for the good in others, to 
stand tiptoe to welcome the spiritual truth behind all 
physical appearances, to become a realist of human ex¬ 
istence. The last vesture of self was torn away. He be¬ 
came a troubadour of God. 

I profess no other share 
In the selection of my lot, than this 
My ready answer to the will of God 
Who summons me to be His organ. All 
Whose innate strength supports them shall succeed 
No better than the sages. 

He might so easily have been a conventional figure in 
American life, of no more use to the universe than a 


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mushroom, a dull, unimaginative, and self-satisfied citi¬ 
zen of a materialistic civilisation. Most of us say at 
one time or another: 

The world is too much with us; late and soon, 

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; 

Little we see in Nature that is ours; 

but not many think how definitely dreary is such an 
existence, or realise that there is a way out—a way out 
into unity and joy. 

Let any man who reads these words ask himself 
whether he knows any way out of this suffocating and 
soul-destroying materialism save only the way taken by 
the Virginian—that plunge away from self, that baptism 
in the moving waters of God—which surely we may 
hope are “for ever at their priest-like task of pure ab¬ 
lution round earth’s human shores.” And the reward! 

Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal, 

Two points in the adventure of the diver. 

One—when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge. 

One—when, a prince, he rises with his pearl? 

Festus, I plunge. 

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a mer¬ 
chant man, seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had 
found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he 
had, and bought it.” 


CONCLUSION 


IMMORTALITY 

QCIENCE teaches that this planet is millions of years 
^ old. For great periods of time it was a flaming mass. 
For still great periods of time its atmosphere was com¬ 
posed of carbon-dioxide—a deadly poison. Before or¬ 
ganic existence was possible, forests of trees had to 
arise, drinking up that poisonous atmosphere and bury¬ 
ing it through their roots in the earth. Millennium suc¬ 
ceeded millennium before this planet, answering to the 
direction of many influences composing its mass, became 
a habitable world. Age succeeded age before it became 
gentle, and many more ages passed away before it at¬ 
tained to a condition of beauty. 

The first forms of organic existence were of the sim¬ 
plest character, and their function was little more than 
an unconscious response to environment. Over vast 
periods of time these lowly forms of life rose to a condi¬ 
tion of greater consciousness, and were able, chiefly by 
heredity, to make a more intelligent response to environ¬ 
ment. Observe at once that in these humble forms of 
life there was the capacity to respond to environment, 
the possibility that they might, as many did, so perish¬ 
ing, refuse to make that response. 

After long aeons of time creatures emerged from this 
patient process of evolution whose brains were capable 

149 



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of co-operating with heredity and environment to ad¬ 
vance the fortunes of their species. But even the highest 
representatives of these creatures were still dominated 
by environment and heredity; their success in the 
struggle for survival lay solely in the perfection with 
which their organs of sensation responded to these two 
great influences. They never once attempted to 
dominate their environment; they never once felt that 
they could be the masters of their instincts. Excellence 
lay for them in co-operating with the exterior stimuli 
which were their destiny. 

A million years ago, or perhaps half a million years 
ago, there ascended from the most cunning and capable 
of these creatures, branching away from the line which 
ended in the higher kind of apes, a being whom we call 
man. He was at first different from other creatures only 
in one respect—he believed himself capable of improv¬ 
ing his conditions. He was acted on by environment, 
but he studied that environment with intelligent eyes. 
He was urged in old-established ways by the drive of 
powerful instincts, but he brooded on that strange 
heredity within him and asked himself if such an instinct 
was good, if such another instinct was bad. 

He ascended to a remarkable dominion over all his 
fellow-creatures. It was the dominion of thought. 
Evolution had at last produced in man a being who could 
weigh evidence, who could reflect, who could choose, who 
could not only defy environment but even cross-examine 
his own consciousness and so master his mastering 
heredity. He invented clothes, he discovered fire, and 
thereby rose superior to the environment of climate. He 
laid down the club of his heredity and prepared for a 
conquering posterity by shaping spear and hook. For 


IMMORTALITY 


151 


him life was improvement. He set himself by the power 
of thought to change the conditions of human existence 
and to strengthen his sense of dominion over all other 
living things. 

Now let us pause to reflect that this ascension of man 
into self-consciousness and a sense of mastery came 
slowly to birth, and from an ancestry slavish but not 
impotent, plastic but not impassive. From the first 
birth of life—and perhaps life is the one invisible sub¬ 
stance out of which all things have been made—there 
was the power of change, the capacity for adaptability. 
Science proclaims this fact as the solid foundation of its 
evolutionary hypothesis. There is no rational thinking 
without it. The very earth has changed again and 
again, growing out of horror into beauty, flinging off 
the likeness of Caliban to put upon itself the whole 
armour of Ariel. The creatures of the earth have 
changed, dying in uncountable millions to produce heirs 
of a higher survival value—creatures more beautiful 
or more cunning than themselves, creatures with a 
keener instinct for their necessity to co-operate with 
environment. And finally came man, with his self-con¬ 
scious mind, with his language, his music, his mathe¬ 
matics, his irresistible urge towards dominance and 
improvement. 

We no longer say with South, “Aristotle was but the 
rubbish of an Adam, and Athens the rudiments of Para¬ 
dise.” We laugh with Jean Paul at such nonsense; 
“Adam, in his state of innocence, possessed a knowledge 
of all the arts and sciences, universal and scholastic his¬ 
tory, the several penal and other codes of law, and all 
the old, dead languages, as well as the living. He was, 




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as it were, a living Pegasus and Pindus, a movable lodge 
of sublime light, a royal literary society, a pocket-seat 
of the Muses, and a short golden age of Louis Quatorze.” 
Humanity has definitely done with such nonsense. Man 
has not fallen; he has wonderfully risen, and is still ad¬ 
vancing. 

The question arises, Is this mighty epic, set in the 
midst of so sublime a universe, without reason, without 
purpose, without value? There is a disposition in the 
modern mind to avoid answering the inevitable question, 
Accident or Design? Science, it is said, neither affirms 
Accident nor accepts Design. Difficult words are strung 
together for the purpose of suggesting some third way of 
looking at the universe. But there can be no third way. 
Either the universe has come to be what it is by mind¬ 
less accident, or its history is the intelligible action of a 
Will. More and more clearly do the best educated men 
of science—those, I mean, who are not ignorant of philo¬ 
sophy and history—perceive that a purpose runs 
through the entire process of evolution. Life did not 
rest content with automatic subsistence. Something in 
itself made an effort to respond more intelligently to 
environment; and that something within itself, having 
responded with marvellous success to the influences with¬ 
out it, becomes in man greater than all other influences. 
“The higher organisms gradually substitute internal for 
external stimuli.” Know thyself was a great utterance; 
The Kingdom of Heaven is within you was a greater 
revelation of truth. 

To what purpose, then, is creation moving? If 
science shows us an immemorial movement from acquies¬ 
cence to dominance, from automatism to choosing rea- 



IMMORTALITY 


153 


son, we can say with confidence that one purpose of this 
movement is the attainment of freedom. Again, if 
science shows us an unbroken movement from structural 
evolution to mental evolution, and from mental evolu¬ 
tion to ethical evolution, we can as confidently say that 
another purpose of this movement is the development of 
a moral being. 

These conclusions admit of no argument. If proto¬ 
plasm is a fact, if Eoanthropus is a fact, so also is 
Seneca a fact, and Francis of Assisi, and Abraham Lin¬ 
coln. If at the beginning of the process is an incan¬ 
descent nebula, at the end of it is man, with his 
distinction between right and wrong, with his craving for 
beauty, with his longing to discover causation. 

Therefore our next rational question concerns the 
character of this movement in life which we call evolu¬ 
tion ; is it a planetary thing, a thing parochial to this 
earth, or is it of the universe? Science makes no separa¬ 
tion of earth and universe. The physical origin of our 
planet is one with all the starry host of heaven. It mat¬ 
ters not whether the earth is the centre of the firmament 
or its least significant constituent; it is there. Surely, 
then, we have at least some show of reason for the as¬ 
sumption that the purpose of terrestrial evolution is 
cosmic. 

The moral freedom of man, attained after millions of 
years of evolution—an attainment, too, if we consider 
the initial horror of this planet, of almost sublime splen¬ 
dour—must have some meaning for the universe. Evo¬ 
lution. brings personality into existence on this earth 
after many millenniums of suffering; what reason have 
we to think that it has now switched off its vitalising 
current of creation? Martineau said that “it is far 


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more incredible that, from not having been, we are, than 
that, from actual being, we shall continue to be.” It is 
the Platonic and Aristotelian question which Professor 
Joachim expresses in this fashion: “Is it possible for 
that which is not to begin to be, and is it possible for that 
which is to cease to be?” Science seems to teach that 
life never ceases to be, but will not yet admit that per¬ 
sonality persists after the collapse of the physical in¬ 
strument. But this is a progress towards nothing, a 
race with no goal but the starting-point, an ascent, the 
topmost peak of which is the bottomless abyss of be¬ 
ginning. 

At this point we must part with science and return 
to our original inquiry, asking ourselves whether the 
fact of conversion furnishes any evidence for the re¬ 
ligious theory that personality is only a stage in evolu¬ 
tion, and that the next stage is the survival of that 
personality as a spirit of the universe. 

It is the testimony of all those who have undergone 
this great spiritual experience that it enables them to 
establish a new relationship with the universe. Just as 
man of the Palaeolithic Period established a relationship 
with reality superior to that of the Primates, and man 
of the Neolithic Period established a similar relationship 
superior to that of his Palaeolithic ancestors, so these 
men, all down the ages, have testified that a subordina¬ 
tion of their lower nature to the demands of their higher 
nature establishes for them a new relationship with 
reality—a relationship so pervasive in its effects that 
they liken it to a new birth. 

“Heighten the internal activities of the soul to a cer¬ 
tain pitch,” said Alger, “and the convictions they en- 


IMMORTALITY 


155 


gender will be so intense, and the experiences so 
absorbing, as irresistibly to sweep away all opposing 
doubts and fill every craving with the triumphant flow 
of life. What overwhelming revelations of the provi¬ 
dence of God and eternal life . . . may thus be made 
to prepared spirits only those who receive them know. 
Paul said he was caught up into the third heaven and 
heard unspeakable words.” 

One notable effect of this change is entirely consonant 
with the findings of physical science. The animal senses, 
we are told by science, are not to be trusted. A man 
who relied upon those senses could not advance a yard 
towards the truth of the physical universe. The eye, the 
ear, the nose, the tongue, and the hand bring many false 
reports to the brain, it is only the man who edits those 
reports with his reason who can arrive at truth. A man 
who relies on his senses must believe that the earth is 
still, that the sun rises and sets, that the stars disappear 
with daylight. He must remain ignorant of electricity; he 
must know nothing of the world revealed by the micro¬ 
scope; he must continue a savage—the dupe of illusion. 

So the man who has experienced conversion reports 
to us that the animal senses are not to be trusted in the 
work of fixing values. Trust to those senses, and you 
will bring civilisation to an end. Jesus becomes the fool 
of history, and Herod the wise man. All materialism, as 
all false science, rests on the animal instincts. Trust 
to them and you can find a good reason for murder, 
greed, and crime of every order; no reason at all for 
self-abnegation. 

Just as science must control the animal senses by 
reason, in order to arrive at physical reality, so, we are 
told by religion, man must control those same senses if 



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he is to arrive at spiritual reality. And just as science 
teaches us that all progress in evolution has depended 
on the establishment of a new relationship with the ac¬ 
tualities of environment, so religion tells us that spiritual 
progress depends on the establishment of a new relation¬ 
ship with the ultimate reality of the universe. 

The religious man, it would seem, carries the work of 
physical science to a logical conclusion. If evolution 
has brought into existence a moral being capable of dis¬ 
tinguishing truth from error, is it not rational to assume 
that this triumph of structural and ethical development 
should continue in a creature minded to investigate the 
truth of its own being? Is man for ever to grope back¬ 
ward for explanation, never to reach forward for satis¬ 
faction? If evolution has created a being able to dominate 
environment and heredity, able to say “I am free,” 
able to choose, able to decide, able to apprehend that 
within itself is a power greater than all the influences 
which determine the lives of other creatures, truly it 
would be absurd to say of such a being that its. freedom 
to choose is limited to material objects. May it not say 
whether it will choose to live or die? May it not exer¬ 
cise its liberty to strengthen within itself that craving 
for ultimate satisfaction w r hich is the most powerful 
energy in its evolution? 

Does it not look as if evolution has toiled solely to 
bring into existence a free creature able of itself to 
choose eternal values, able and willing to set its affections 
on those spiritual qualities which lift the race above the 
stagnations of animalism? Does it not seem a natural 
inference from the theory of evolution that a race which 


IMMORTALITY 


157 


rises above the stagnations of animalism, and produces 
individuals who live spiritual lives, is capable of attain¬ 
ing to a spiritual consummation? Why this freedom of 
man’s soul? Why this infinite labour of evolution? If 
purpose is admitted, if accident is excluded, surely here 
in the freedom of man’s soul to choose good and to reject 
evil, here in his passionate hope of immortality, is the 
one rational explanation of the world process. 

We reach the question of rewards and punishment. 
The natural reward of the man who desires spiritual 
satisfactions (in religious language, who loves God) is 
the opportunity to enjoy those satisfactions. The na¬ 
tural punishment of the man who desires animal satisfac¬ 
tions (in religious language, who denies God) is the death 
of his soul—that part of him which can only be satisfied 
by spiritual growth, that immortable part of him which 
hunger and thirst after righteousness might have ren¬ 
dered immortal. Such a theory of rewards and punish¬ 
ments not only furnishes the mind with an honourable 
idea of- the Creator’s justice, but provides the evolu¬ 
tionary hypothesis with a completing purpose worthy 
of its travail. 

“Love is the one thing in the world,” says Professor 
Simpson, “that cannot be forced; the moment compul¬ 
sion or pressure enters, it ceases to be Love. Man can 
only respond spontaneously to the Love of God as a 
free being, otherwise the response can have no value 
even to God Himself.” 

' Immortality, in this view, is seen as the crown of 
physical creation, the achievement to w T hich evolution is 
still working. Man, with his freedom from exterior in¬ 
fluences and his dominion over the obstructions of his own 


\ 


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animal nature, appears before us, not as a wretched 
and guilty person seeking to save his soul from cruel 
and tyrannical punishment, but as the heir of all the 
ages, who grows into the likeness of the thing he loves, 
who becomes immortal because with all his heart, and 
with all his mind, and with all his strength he hungers 
and thirsts after the things of immortality. 

Such a thesis of existence gives a new dignity to re¬ 
ligion. In this thesis religion moves to the van of evolu¬ 
tion, and becomes neither a picturesque tradition nor a 
lingering superstition, but the trumpet-note of man’s 
attaining spirit. It calls to those who march forward 
to press confidently on; it rouses hope in the heart of 
those who struggle and fall; it warns those who refuse 
to follow that death will overtake them in the night. It 
is the spirit of evolution; it is the voice of God. 

The depressed and disheartened Churches are in evil 
plight chiefly, I think, because they have no thesis of 
existence in their minds, no creative conception of the 
evolutionary thesis, only an inherited theology of which 
they begin to feel a little ashamed. If they realised 
that their duty is not to patch and repair that theology, 
but rather, with great enthusiasm and a proved faith, 
to rouse in the soul of man the longing, the desire, the 
love, which alone can gain for him the unimaginable bliss 
of immortality, they would not now occupy a position 
in the world which none more keenly than themselves 
knows to be unworthy. 

“The one all-important doctrine of the Early 
Church,” says Mr. Cotterill in A History of Art , “was 
that of Eternal Life. ... It is noticeable that, whether 
from a Greek-like repugnance to painful subjects in 
art or because joy at the thought of Paradise and re- 


IMMORTALITY 


159 


union caused the Atonement and the Passion to affect 
them far less profoundly than they affected more ascetic 
or more sensational natures in later days, there is to be 
found in the Catacombs no representation of the Cruci¬ 
fixion, nor of any martyrdom or massacre—subjects 
which afterwards, perhaps in consequence of Lombard 
and other Northern influences, became so common in 
Italian painting.” 

No discipline could be more disastrous, I take leave 
to say, to the mind of a just man seeking to become a 
prophet of the Christian religion than a course of study 
in the average theological college of the present day. 
From such a gateway to the religious life most men of 
character turn back either with sorrow or disgust. 
Those who face the discipline learn that their prepara¬ 
tion for the gospel of immortality consists in strangling 
their intellectual conscience, learning a few tricks of 
theological disputation, and harnessing their spiritual 
enthusiasms to the three-wheeled coach of ceremonial 
priestcraft. They find themselves ministers of Christ in 
a world which has no use for them or for Him—the 
Christ of their theology. 

Surely there is a grandeur in the Christ of God which 
has escaped them. Surely, if they had penetrated His 
secret, they too would be life changers, they too would 
bring life and immortality to light. But these men, the 
overwhelming majority of them, the majority so fatal to 
religious vitality, have not sought to harmonise their 
wills with the Will of God, have not risen to the heights 
of spiritual desire, where the will of the creature finds 
itself in the Will of its Creator; rather have they la- 



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boured, with an intellectual dishonesty perilous to spirit¬ 
ual health, merely to out-talk with the worst notions 
of an inadequate theology the surest facts of material 
science. To be faithful to a tradition, to bolster up the 
ceremonies of a superstition as dead for all honest men 
as the Ptolemaic astronomy or the rites of Dionysus, 
this is to them the religious life, this the end and object 
of evolution. “Many shall say to me in that day, Lord, 
Lord. . 

We may see in such men as these, who commit, we 
must suppose, one of the most dreadful of sins in mis¬ 
representing the love and justice of God and in obscur¬ 
ing the true purpose of Jesus, a confirmation of F. B.’s 
teaching that sin is a refusal of the will to conform it¬ 
self to the Will of God. Science, criticism, philosophy, his¬ 
tory, tell these men that they are wrong; they themselves 
are not only conscious of failure, but publicly confess 
and lament their discreditable impotence; yet nothing 
can persuade them that they are not the oracles of 
God. Obstinately do they stick to their opinions, stub¬ 
bornly do they refuse to submit themselves to the Truth 
which alone can make them a power, to the Service which 
alone can set them free. Their position is precisely that 
of the traditionalist and the ceremonialist in the days of 
Jesus, and they cannot see it. Their eyes are blinded 
and their hearts hardened. Never once have they real¬ 
ised that the crisis in spiritual life arises only when the 
mortal, hungering and thirsting after the things of im¬ 
mortality, empties himself of all intellectual conceits, 
all theological prejudices, and all moral egoisms, be¬ 
seeching the Eternal Righteousness, with the whole heart 
and the whole will, for a communion which needs no rite 


IMMORTALITY 


161 


and a companionship which is itself both a religion and 
a theology. 

The original purpose of God, says Professor Simp¬ 
son, is complete self-communication to a being who can 
come into fellowship with Him. There is a moment in 
the life of a man, a moment of choice, a moment of de¬ 
cision, when this original purpose of God is achieved. 
According to the faith of the individual, and according 
to the measure of his desire, he receives a consciousness 
of God which bestows upon him an entirely new sense of 
reality. 

This, at all events, is the testimony of those who have 
been marvellously changed by conversion and themselves 
have become changers of human life. They all agree, 
whatever their various theological inheritance, that any 
form of wilfulness in the mind is a vital bar to a vital 
consciousness of God; that as soon as the mind, wdth 
real honesty and a consuming desire for that divine con¬ 
sciousness, hates its sin and turns to God, the will is 
new born; and, finally, that henceforth life for them 
becomes transfigured by a joy of which they had hither¬ 
to no conception, a joy which seems to consist of, first, 
a poignant conviction of the reality of God’s response to 
their craving, second, an entire sense of freedom from 
a division in personality; and third, a sense of creative 
power in the lives of other men, making for a like happi¬ 
ness with their own. 

Ruskin used to say that he did not wonder at what 
men suffered, but at w T hat they lost. The idea that im¬ 
mortality is something to be attained by the purified 
human will hungering and thirsting after the perfection 


162 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


of God helps one to realise the tremendous significance 
of Christ’s question, “For what shall it profit a man if 
he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” 

Also it helps one, I think, to see a depth of meaning 
in that familiar phrase—too familiar perhaps —The 
Peace of God. For is it not apparent that if mankind 
could be brought to believe that the attainment of per¬ 
sonal immortality is the object and consummation of 
all the travail of earth’s ages, if this knowledge were 
as generally received, let us say, as the knowledge of 
physical evolution, is it not clear to us that ma'n would 
soon make an end of all those brawlings of materialism 
which in parliaments and market-places war against the 
peace of his soul? Is it not certain that in the unity 
of so grand and dignified a faith a peace hitherto un¬ 
known on earth would inspire our politics, our com¬ 
merce, our manners, and our art? No brotherhood of 
man, it would seem, is possible—nay, is conceivable— 
until the nations of the earth are of one mind concern¬ 
ing the purpose of existence. 

Therefore with what impatience, and with how des¬ 
pairing a regret, must those who long for the Peace of 
God see the Churches wasting their energies on matters 
which divide rather than unite, neglecting for teachings 
which obscure, depress, and after two thousand years 
of repetition make no difference to man or nation, the 
one great central teaching of their Master which saves 
the individual and glorifies the human race? 

“In some kind of a direct relation to Him,” says Pro¬ 
fessor Simpson, “men of all races and civilisations have 
found that they are freed from the tormenting internal 
dualism so characteristic of humanity, and begin to be¬ 
come masters of themselves through some moral energy 




IMMORTALITY 


163 


that is associated with Him. He gives liberty to the 
captive; the spiritual life of men, as often indeed their 
physical life also in some measure, is renewed in every 
aspect through this relation with Him. It is a trans¬ 
formation that reaches to the very core of a man’s being, 
to the self that has been struggling for affirmation and 
control; a spiritual Power is at work which is an ex¬ 
pression of this new relation. It may be difficult to ex¬ 
plain the fact, but it is there. Throughout the world 
there is an increasing race of men—the word is not too 
strong, although the characteristics are not physical, 
but spiritual—who by an act of will, bringing themselves 
into relation with Him, attain to yet greater liberty, 
and begin to develop a quality of life which, if His words 
are true, is eternal.” 

For many thousands of years the great rivers of the 
world flooded to the sea while man bore his burden on 
his back and carried a dim candle through the long win¬ 
ter night of his ignorance. Then came one who saw 
the power in those waters, and drew that power from 
them as they passed on their way to the ocean, making 
it drive his carriage and light his city. 

From the beginning of time this earth has moved 
round the sun through an immovable and atomless ether, 
invisible to the eye, inaudible to the ear, intangible to the 
hand. Not until yesterday did man perceive this super¬ 
atmosphere of life, and now he makes it carry his words 
from one side of the world to the other, speaking on 
this side of the Atlantic, answered at the same moment 
from the other. 

So men have lived with the Presence of God always 
in their midst from the dawn of the moral consciousness, 



164 


MORE TWICE-BORN MEN 


a Power above all other powers, a Force above all other 
forces, an Energy above all other energies. They have 
seen the glory of these moving waters and worshipped 
the starlight brought to their struggling souls by this 
invisible ether, but few have seen in that Presence of the 
Divine a Power able to change the whole face of human 
existence. 

The future of civilisation, rising at this moment from 
the ruins of materialism, would seem to lie in an intelli¬ 
gent use by man of this ultimate source of spiritual 
Power. To make use of that Power it appears necessary 
that the human will must be sounding the same note, 
pursuing the same end, working in the same spirit. One 
of the simplest sayings of Jesus makes it clear that 
man’s ability to draw upon this inexhaustible and im¬ 
measurable source of eternal life is determined by his 
desire for it: “Blessed are they which do hunger and 
thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled.” 


THE END 


Ji Selection from the 
Catalogue of 

G. P. PUTNAM S SONS 


Complete Catalogues sent 
on application 


* 


Painted Windows 

By 

A Gentleman with a Duster 

8 °. 12 Illustrations 

The author of Mirrors of Downing Street, 
and The Glass of Fashion, whose words of 
inspiring truth have spread to every part of 
the world where English is spoken, reveals in 
Painted Windows the chaos of opinion which 
exists in the modern Church. But there is no 
pulling down,—the book is constructive, hope¬ 
ful; destroying only that which cumbers the 
ground, and destroying with brilliant and 
amazing surety. 

“PAINTED WINDOWS,” says the Philadelphia 
Public Ledger, “is no laugh in the void, no flash in the 
dark, but a searching criticism of men and the 
church in an hour that calls for spiritual leadership 
and power.’* 


G. P. Putnam’s Sons 

New York London 




Seven Ages 

A Narrative of the Human Mind 

By 

A Gentleman with a Duster 

8vo. With 7 Portraits 

In his new book, the author of “The Mirrors of Downing 
Street” traces the main current of human thought from the 
age of Socrates down to the present time. 

The book is written with great simplicity. The author’s 
purpose is to help the plain man to understand how it is he 
holds his opinions, to trace, as it were, the pedigree of his ideas, 
to dig down to the roots of his thoughts. 

Civilisation is now in the hands of the average person. 
The whole fortunes of the human race are committed to a 
multitude of voters who have had little or no opportunity of 
acquainting themselves with the great controversies of the 
past out of which those fortunes have emerged to their present 
condition. To place in the hands of this multitude a book 
which simply and picturesquely tells the narrative of the 
human mind may, in the author’s opinion, do at least some¬ 
thing to safeguard the higher life of mankind. Although it 
is not a book intended for scholars, the author believes that 
no recognized authority in scholarship will impugn the ac¬ 
curacy of his history, or seriously dispute his main conclusion. 

The usefulness of such an idea is manifest. It will be for 
the reader to decide upon its success. 

CONTENTS 

Introduction The Age of Augustine 

The Age of Socrates The Age of Erasmus 

The Age of Aristotle The Age of Cromwell 

The Age of Jesus The Age of Wesley 

Conclusion, summarising the effects of Darwinism, 
and stating the present position of human thought. 


New York G. P. Putnam’s Sons London 










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